THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’S PAST...The Battle for China’s Past Mao and the Cultural Revolution Mobo Gao Pluto Press London • Ann Arbor, MI 00 Pluto Prelims:template candidate.qxd

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’S PAST

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The Battle for China’s Past

Mao and the Cultural Revolution

Mobo Gao

Pluto PressLondon • Ann Arbor, MI

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First published 2008 by Pluto Press345 Archway Road, London N6 5AAand 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

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Copyright © Mobo Gao 2008

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To my father Gao Renfa and mother Jiang Yuanrong, whosewhole lives were devoted to the well-being of their children.

To those who sacrificed their lives for the improvement ofliving conditions of the poor and the disadvantaged.

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Contents

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

1. Debating the Cultural Revolution 13Introduction: who is writing history and who are the Chinese? 13The haojie discourse and the Cultural Revolution 15Violence, brutality and causes 17Constructive policies 19Destruction of Chinese culture and tradition 20Cultural Revolution and cultural creativity 28What is the Enlightenment? 30

2. Constructing history: memories, values and identity 31Introduction: speech act of identification 31From the wounded to the mentalité: the re-rehearsal of May Fourth 32Be American citizens in thinking 37Sinological orientalism 38Two whateverism 38The politics of joining the civilized world 40Media agenda and identification with the West 41Memoirs, values and identification 42The intellectual–business–political complex in contemporary China 45Conclusion: memories, identity, knowledge and truth 45

3. Constructing history: memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in Chinese 48Introduction: scope and rationale 48Memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in Chinese: a literature survey 49The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth 53Some common themes on Mao and the Cultural Revolution 54Memories as history 61Conclusion: discourse, narratives and memories 63

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4. Mao, The Unknown Story: an intellectual scandal 65Introduction hyper-promotion of a book 65Scholarship, what scholarship? 66Misleading claims and absurd explanations 71Further evidence of ‘scholarship’ 73Further evidence of flaws and misleading claims 74Logical inconsistency within the text 75Mao, China’s Hitler and Stalin 77Fairy tale and how scholarship changes 78Does it matter? 79It does not matter so long as the politics is right 80

5. Mao: the known story and the logic of denial 81Introduction: Mao the known story, a general outline 81Evidence of the known story 82So what was the problem? 84The famine death toll 85The economy in the Mao era 87The yardstick of Hitler: a favourite European comparison 88Mao’s personality: the known story 89The logic of denial of the known story 90Academic reception 91Revolution: from farewell to burial 92Furet and the French Revolution 93Is revolution inevitable? 94An alternative model of development 95

6. How a medical doctor doctors history: a case study of Li Zhisui 97Introduction; expatriate Chinese memories - a literary phenomenon 97Memories and the politics of knowledge production 98The book 99Knowledge gap 100Knowledge production and the market 101The logic of the differences in two versions 101Who is to be fooled and why? 102Protests from the insiders 103Was Li Mao’s personal physician? 103How much did the doctor know? 104What did the medical doctor know about politics? 105The politics of sex 106

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History as doctored by the doctor and his US mentors: a critical analysis 107Conclusion: history what history? 115

7. Challenging the hegemony: contrary narratives in the e-media (I) – Mao and the Cultural Revolution 117Introduction: emerging contrary narratives 117Media effect, public space and e-media 118Ma Yinchu, population control and elite attitudes 120The credibility of Li Rui 121Challenging the late-Mao thesis 123Challenging Jung Chang and Jon Halliday 125Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and the Great Leap Forward 126Debates on issues related to the Cultural Revolution 128Disagreement between Mao and Liu Shaoqi: the two-line struggle thesis 128Other unofficial views of the Cultural Revolution 132Sea change of attitudes 133Wang Xizhe the dissident 134Kong Qingdong and the cowshed 134Memoirs of different narratives 135Challenging Wang Youqin 135Conclusion: the question of truth 136

8. Challenging the hegemony: contrary narratives in the e-media (II) – the Mao era 137Introduction: history in socioeconomic context 137The state of the economy in the Mao era and during the Cultural Revolution 137Manufacturing truth 147Signs of a re-evaluation of Jiang Qing 148The issues of health care and education 151A re-evaluation of Kang Sheng? 154The Chinese themselves say so 155Manufacturing truth and e-media counter-action 155The legacy of Mao and the e-media 156Conclusion: voices from the bottom for a battle that has just begun 157

9. The problem of the rural–urban divide in pursuit of modernity: values and attitudes 159Introduction: the year 2003 159The rise of China, but the risk of collapse 159The urban–rural divide 160

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Three stories of rural pain 161Rural Chinese: beasts of burden on whom modernity is built 163The rural–urban divide: values and attitudes 165

Post-Mao reforms: myths versus reality 167Conclusion: the state and the countryside 171

10. The battle of China’s history: seeing the past from the present 173Introduction: a little incident 173Three questions about the post-Mao reforms 174Is China a capitalist country? And does it matter? 177Capitalism with Chinese characteristics? 185White cat, black cat: the argument of efficiency versus fairness 189Seeing the past from the present: a hole in the discursive hegemony 190

Conclusion: truth and belief values of socialism and China’s future direction 191

Truth and belief values of a political discourse 191Truth and belief value of exploiting the peasantry 192Do the values of socialism matter? 192Learning from past failures 193The socialist truth and belief value of land ownership 194The socialist truth and belief value of labour law 196The socialist truth and belief values of healthcare and education 197The battle of China’s history 198China’s future direction 200

Notes 202Glossary of Chinese terms and names 211Bibliography 222Index 266

C O N T E N T S

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Acknowledgements

This book has been in process for several years and has been the resultof discussions with and feedback from many friends and colleagues. Itake this opportunity to thank all of those who cannot be named here.

I would also like to thank Martin Hart-Landsberg, who madedetailed comments and extensive suggestions after reading the wholedraft, and Greg Benton, who has also read the whole draft and gavevaluable suggestions and advice. Their help has had an essentialimpact on the final product, though of course they are not responsiblefor the errors and mistakes.

I would also like to thank Yan Hairong, who never fails to give hersupport, either scholarly, or personally, and Kaz Ross, who went throughthe draft at one go and made valuable comments and suggestions.

I would also like to express my appreciation of the anonymousreviewers for their support of this book and for their suggestions forimprovement.

I of course must thank David Castle, the commissioning editor ofPluto Press. David is not only quick, decisive, and most profes-sional, but also extremely supportive, always ready to accept anyauthor’s suggestions that may be beneficial in bringing the publica-tion to fruition. The team at Pluto Press has to be acknowledged tobe thoroughly professional as well as highly sympathetic.

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Introduction

In 2004 at a friend’s party I met a Mr Chen, an energetic recent migrantfrom the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in his late fifties. Chenworks for a profitable company in Australia and his main task is sellingtimber products to China; he mentioned to me that he was in theprocess of signing a large deal. Chen was confident that in 20 yearstime China would overtake Japan economically and he talked abouthow China has been developing fast and so on. In order to quell whatI thought was an unbalanced enthusiasm, I mentioned that China wasnot a high-tech producer, but just a place for foreign companies toexploit cheap labour – the assembling factory of the world. I pointedout to him the fast-emerging social inequalities: that a rural migrantworker may have to work 16 or more hours a day for seven days aweek to earn about US$80 a month, and that perhaps this is not some-thing that can be called ‘development’. Chen replied: ‘$80 is goodenough for a peasant.’

I could not help but ask: ‘Would you accept that kind of paymentand life?’

‘That is not the same. Tamen suzhi di [they are low quality people],’he said.

Then the topic turned to what I was going to do in China for myresearch. I said I would like to go back to Gao Village area to find outwhat the rural people think of the Cultural Revolution. He wasgenuinely surprised:

‘To study the Cultural Revolution? Why do you want to find outwhat the rural people think? Rural China was not much affected [bythe Cultural Revolution].’

I replied that: ‘The majority of Chinese are in rural China. If ruralChina was not much affected by the Cultural Revolution, why do you,the CCP and many of the elite intelligentsia keep repeating that theCultural Revolution was a ten-year calamity for China?’ To whichChen said, ‘You have very strange concepts.’

This book is about such ‘strange concepts’, so strange that they chal-lenge the mainstream orthodox narrative; it questions many ‘truths’told in memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, both in Chineseand English. It endeavours to find out whether these perspectives,which are officially considered to be unorthodox and ‘strange’, may bewidely shared by most ordinary people in China, the farmers andworkers. If they are, the book aims to analyse the reasons behind thisgap between the official and unofficial, and between the mainstream

positions of the elite intelligentsia in orthodox historiography andopposing views expressed in the e-media.

To many outside China, especially those who have grown up withEuropean cultural traditions, China is an enigma, a place so different thata first visit is most often a culture shock. On the other hand, and some-what paradoxically, China’s increasing similarity to the developed worldis seen as a threat. For many inside China however, despite the Maoistrevolutions, the West has for over a century-and-a-half been the yard-stick of material progress and development, and also of spiritual andpersonal development. Yet, notwithstanding this view within China,there is a Western perception that the Chinese were or are anti-Western,China-centred and xenophobic. On the other hand, almost every time apolitician or head of a state visiting China does not take a tough standagainst China – as is perceived to be necessary on, for example, the issueof human rights – the mainstream Western media accuses that govern-ment or that politician of kowtowing to China. The apparently huge gapbetween these conflicting images and perceptions of China requiresinterpretation and understanding. This book engages with that task.

The possibility, and I still think it is only a possibility, that Chinamay rise to a leading position on the international stage makes Chinaa hot contemporary topic. The notable economic development in Chinais being hailed not only as a result of post-Mao reform but also as aproof that the era of Mao was a communist-inspired disaster. This bookshows that that position is dangerously misleading in four ways. First,it deprives a probable majority of the Chinese of the right to speak up.Second, it hides the ugly fact that there are millions of people who areactually worse off since the post-Mao reform years. Third, it denies theenormous achievements made during the Mao era that paved the wayfor later development. Finally, it is misleading and it distracts from andprecludes imaginings of alternative models of development and otherpossible forms of human organization.

Many issues surrounding the Mao era need to be re-examined andnew interpretations provided. For example, where in the scale ofhistorical achievement and worth does Mao stand? Are the ideas andpractices carried out under his leadership relevant and significant totoday’s China? To judge from much of the writings in memoirs, biog-raphies and autobiographies such as Li Zhisui’s Private Life of Mao,Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story, and otherswritten in Chinese, Mao was a callous, calculating, inhumane, power-hungry monster. However, in contrast to those depictions, Mao’sbodyguards, nurses and some others who worked with him, like ChenBoda and Wang Li, show Mao very differently and in a more positivelight. These disparate views exemplify the contradictory perceptionsand evaluations between various ‘memories’ on this and related issues.

T H E B AT T L E F O R C H I N A’S PA S T

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Another example of these polarized views occurred in December2006, when Deng Xiaoping’s son Deng Pufang, who was crippled atthe beginning of the Cultural Revolution, told a group of journaliststhat the Cultural Revolution was not only a disaster for himself but forthe whole of the Chinese state and the Chinese people. This almostroutine response triggered hundreds of thousands of responses frombloggers and chatrooms. According to an estimate on one website, Xinlang wang, only two weeks after Deng’s remark there had been morethan 20,000 feedback entries covering a staggering 1,166 pages(Blinders 2006). One e-media participant who claims to have witnessedthe incident states that Deng Pufang was not crippled because he wasthrown out of the window by Red Guards, as it is often claimed orassumed, nor because he had jumped. Deng was trying to escape fromthe room where he was confined by climbing down a sewage pipe.When the old pipe broke, Deng fell onto the concrete below and crip-pled himself (Ma Ming 2006). One seasoned e-media activist, LiXuanyuan, suggests that Deng Pufang should look into the officialstatistics and consider how many migrant workers have been crippledeach year by mining accidents, or have had their fingers and arms cutoff in sweatshops all over China, especially in the developed areas ofthe southeast coast. An overwhelming majority disagreed with Deng’sviewpoint, indicating perhaps a more positive view of the Mao erathan was generally expected.

Considering that Roderick MacFarquhar of Harvard University, aprominent scholar of the Cultural Revolution, fails to recognize thatthere is a vast majority of people in China who not only remember theera of Mao as ‘the good old days’, but who also like and admire theman (Wu Yiching 2006), there is an urgent need to make availablemuch that is unknown to many. It is important to hear the voice thatmay resonate among the vast majority of the Chinese, who cannotsimply be dismissed as ignorant and brainwashed. We need to remindourselves that in China, as in any other society, there was and there isa social hierarchy, and that different perceptions by different sectors ofChinese society should be considered equally legitimate. ManyChinese expatriates such as Jung Chang dislike Mao because they ortheir families were the victims of Mao’s theory and practice of classstruggle. On the other hand, people such as rural farmers and urbanworkers might not have a reason to dislike Mao. For many of themthere may be reasons to think positively of him.

History is not simply a picture or reconstruction of what happened: itis our present construction of the past. The way we construct the pastdepends on how we conceptualize our world and ourselves in the pres-ent. Therefore how one sees the worth of the Mao era depends not onlyon what one’s present circumstances are but also on one’s present values

I N T R O D U C T I O N

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and beliefs. In other words, the way we conceptualize ourselves in thepresent frames our perception of the past. This book analyses the presentvalues and beliefs of those remembering and retelling the past, andexamines the way that these values and beliefs frame our understandingof the past.

Of course there are always a variety of values and beliefs at anygiven time in any society. But there is always one set that is actuallydominant. Regarding the Mao era there is currently a two-faceteddominant conceptualization, with one facet that is external to Chinaand one that is internal to it, each interacting with the other. Theexternal facet is the rise to predominance of neoliberalism immediatelybefore and after the collapse of the alternative existing ‘communist’model of human development. The triumph of the capitalist marketeconomy is the broad conceptualization that frames our understandingand interpretation of our world and ourselves. The internal facet is thefarewell to revolution, and therefore the necessity of denouncing theCultural Revolution totally and thoroughly. The dominant discursivehegemony of neoliberalism (Wang Hui 2004) and the worldwideconversion to capitalism led to the total denigration of the CulturalRevolution, Mao the man and the times he so directly influenced, andfinally, of the whole idea of populist revolution.

This book presents a different conceptualization from that of theneoliberal hegemony, and from its total denigration of the Maoistlegacy. Obviously, the book does not attempt to argue that there wasnothing wrong with the era of Mao. Nor does it attempt to argue thatMao was not responsible for any of the problems and disasters inChina under his leadership. It does not attempt to deny that there wasviolence and brutality inflicted upon millions of people in the name ofrevolution. Instead, this work attempts to demonstrate that there areother possible interpretations, other evidence and other argumentsthan the dominant ones.

Take the case of the Great Leap Forward as an example. There hasbeen a continuous debate about the death toll of the resulting famine,with scholarly estimates ranging from 18 million to about 30 milliondeaths, but with recent estimates by an e-media participant as low as200,000. So the claim by Chang and Halliday (2005) that Mao murdered38 million people, and other claims that he was only partially responsi-ble and that the death tolls were much smaller, need to be reconsidered.There are now so many different interpretations of the Great LeapForward and Mao’s part in it that they need to be re-evaluated.

Clearly, one’s values and beliefs orientate one’s direction of under-standing and even one’s selection of evidence for an argument orpremise. The Cultural Revolution discourse is a prime example. Formany Chinese government officials and members of the intelligentsia


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who were dismissed from their posts and were ordered to live andwork in what was called Wu qi gan xiao (the May Seventh CadreSchool), the experience is now narrated as ‘detention in a labour camp’,and a violation of fundamental human rights. But for Mao and othersat that time, and for many even now, it was intended to create newsubjectivity. It was intended that the urban and social elite would expe-rience physical labour so that they would be able to understand andempathize with the reality of life of the majority of the people. It wasmeant to be an approach to a new way of governing and governance.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official view of the CulturalRevolution, corresponding to the mainstream Chinese intelligentsiaunderstanding and interpretation, is well received and supported bythe Western media and most of the scholarly community. For example,in Thurston’s view the Cultural Revolution led to ‘loss of culture, andof spiritual values; loss of hope and ideals; loss of time, truth, and oflife; loss, in short, of nearly everything that gives meaning to life’(Thurston 1984–85: 605–6). What Thurston says here more or lesssummarizes the general evaluation of the Cultural Revolution held bythe mainstream Western political, cultural and scholarly elite. Thisquote, for instance, is cited by Lucian Pye (1986), a prominent USscholar of Chinese political culture, and by Lee (2003), another USscholar on the very subject of the Cultural Revolution.

Many others would argue, however, that while the first two years ofchaos and destruction have been highlighted by the ‘cold war warriors’and neoliberals alike, the positive and constructive years from 1969 tothe early 1970s have been forgotten or obscured (Wang Shaoguang 2006).These positive legacies include a massive infrastructure programme,radical education reforms, innovative experimentation in literature andthe arts, expansion of healthcare and education in rural areas, and rapiddevelopment of rural enterprises. The Cultural Revolution involvedmany millions of people who willingly participated in what they saw asa movement to better Chinese society and humanity in general. A wholerange of ideas and issues from politics to education and healthcare, from literature and the arts to industrial and agricultural policies wereexamined, tried and tested.

Some of these experiments succeeded, some failed and some did nothave time to come to fruition before they were prematurely terminated.In the sphere of science for instance, if one takes seriously the stated goalsof ‘mass science’, then it is clear that there was, contrary to the mainstreamclaims, a valuable development of science during the Cultural Revolution(Schmalzer 2006). The archaeological discoveries at Mawangdui led to thediscovery of a Chinese medical remedy for malaria, while the delivery ofprimary healthcare, the development of integrated techniques for control-ling insect pests, and the advance of earthquake predictions are examples


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of scientific progress at this time. Particularly notable for popular scien-tific education is the science of paleoanthropology. Guided by the theorythat labour creates and defines humanity, and that labour is the drivingforce behind human development, and that therefore the labouringmasses are the bearers of the torch of science, popular science such as isexemplified by the magazine Fossils emerged in spite of resistance fromthe elite intelligentsia (Schmalzer 2006).

Mao’s political experiment, the Cultural Revolution, like all othersocial revolutions before it, claimed many victims. It did however, againlike other social revolutions, have some positive outcomes. It encour-aged grassroots participation in management and it also inspired theidea of popular democracy. The mass criticism practised in the era ofMao in general and during the Cultural Revolution in particular, thoughritualized and mobilized from the top, did provide a rich repertoire ofprotest techniques (Perry 2003). ‘Members of the Red Guards were notjust passive followers of a charismatic leader, but agents activelyinvolved in a variety of ideological disputes and contests for power’(Calhoun and Wasserstrom 2003: 251). The Chinese were not the brain-less masses manipulated by a ruthless dictator so often portrayed in theWestern media. They must be seen as agents of history and subjects oftheir own lives like any other people. Anyone who seriously believes inthe inherent value of individualism, in the self-evident truth of thehuman pursuit of happiness, or the universal value of human rights anddemocracy should be sympathetic with this position.

In the area of industrial development, Mao took a strongly socialistview, concerning himself with eradicating the usual divide between therural and urban. Under his leadership a strategy was developed andimplemented to trial a decentralized non-Soviet form of industryprogramme. It was proposed that the rural population could becomeindustrialized without a need to build cities or urban ghettos, a strategyinitiated during the Great Leap Forward, shelved because of the faminedisaster, but picked up again during the Cultural Revolution. As Wong(2003: 203) shows, by the end of the decade of the Cultural Revolution in1979, there were nearly 800,000 industrial enterprises scattered invillages and small towns, plus almost 90,000 small hydroelectric stations.These enterprises employed nearly 25 million workers and produced anestimated 15 per cent of the national industrial output. This developmentprovided the critical preconditions for the rapid growth of township andvillage enterprises in the post-Mao reform period.

In much of the literature that is reviewed and discussed in this book,the Cultural Revolution is conceptualized as a personal power struggleby Mao, who manipulated the party, the army, the students and theChinese people. However, what was proclaimed and recognizedduring the Cultural Revolution was that a continuous revolution was


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required for China to remain a socialist country and to achieve itssocialist goals. It was recognized that some CCP leaders were nation-alist revolutionaries who joined the CCP to fight imperialism and‘feudalism’. Although these leaders tolerated land reform and nation-alization of capitalist industry with foreign connections, they did notlike the programme of rural collectivization and the confiscation ofproperties owned by the Chinese nationalist capitalists. Liu Shaoqi, forinstance, did not even like the idea of agricultural co-operatives in 1951(Tao 2003). There was, therefore, a danger that China would return tocapitalism unless there were a revolution ostensibly concerned withchanging cultural values and beliefs. And that was why it was calledthe Cultural Revolution.

Within the conceptual framework of human rights and neoliber-alism, the revolutionary goals and strategy of the Cultural Revolutionare seen as pointless victimization of all the political and cultural elite.It is either forgotten or ignored that at the time Mao stressed that thosewho really wanted to restore capitalism were a tiny minority, about 1to 2 per cent within the party; among this small percentage of ‘capi-talist roaders’, most could be educated to correct themselves and onlya few could not be changed. Among the small group of die-hard capi-talist roaders, Mao (1967a, 1968) stressed that their sons and daughtersshould not be stigmatized as being the same as their parents. It wasclear at that time that the Cultural Revolution was aimed at educatingand was not meant to victimize a whole class of people. However,today this kind of revolutionary conceptualization of tempering newsubjectivity is totally forgotten or has become an alien concept.

Just as there are alternative views to the official and dominantjudgements of the Mao era, there are also alternative views concerningthe ‘reform’ period. Take the case of rural migrant workers as anexample of how different conceptual paradigms can frame differentinterpretations and understandings. Since the late 1980s, every yearapproximately 100 to 200 million people from rural China have beeneither looking for jobs or working in the cities. For many neoliberals,such as Professor Qin Hui, this rural exodus has been the second liber-ation for the peasants, because he says they now have the freedom tomove from rural villages to urban areas to work. For many ruralChinese, however, this liberation is deceptive. It provides a sense offreedom to the rural young, who really have no other choice. Teenagersworking for an average 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week to earnabout 600 RMB a month (a rate unchanged for more than a decadeuntil very recently) under dangerous and hazardous conditions – isthis really liberation? Mr Chen would certainly think so. Perhaps weshould consider whether those teenagers would feel more ‘liberated’by going to school and college like their urban counterparts.


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Throughout the book I argue that our conceptualizations may frameour research methodology and our selection of evidence; however I amnot saying that there should not be methodological conventions or thatone method may not be more rigorous than another. Nor am Isuggesting that there are not undisputed facts. It is an undisputed factthat the Great Leap Forward contributed towards a famine. Nor isthere any dispute that the Cultural Revolution victimized many interms of personal humiliation, physical assaults, arbitrary detention,loss of property and even death. But I do argue that there are otherfacts that should not be ignored and need to be included in anybalanced account of China’s history.

Parallel to the understanding of the Cultural Revolution as a totaldisaster is the belief that the post-Mao reforms, supposedly designedby the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, have achieved economicmiracles in China. This claim has been repeated in so many differentversions that it has become a cliché. However, a counter-narrative isavailable from some who know Chinese society well. Lau’s (2004: 230)comments are an example of this: ‘Now, what can they offer their chil-dren? If they make enough money, they hope to send their childrenabroad so that they have a better life in the United States and nevercome back to China, because China is going to be hell.’

Through in-depth analysis of memoirs, autobiographies and biogra-phies, by presenting the debate over the Cultural Revolution betweenliberals and the New Left, and with information gained from fieldworkin rural China and the e-media, the book provides the following:

• a critique of the contemporary discourse concerning the Mao era,with an emphasis on the Cultural Revolution and a re-evaluationof the man and his legacy

• documentation of the various narratives, and debates, especially inthe increasingly important e-media, concerning this period

• analysis and evaluation of these narratives and debates• a general evaluation of the post-Mao reforms in relation to the

legacy of the Mao era• a conceptual framework which shows that our present values and

beliefs frame our memories of the past.

The book is therefore not just about memories of the past, but alsoabout what is happening in the present. It is not just about the CulturalRevolution, Mao the man and the Mao era. It is also about contempo-rary China. On a deep level it is about liberalism versus revolution andabout continuity versus change. It is about alternative models of devel-opment, and in a word, it is about our quest for betterment and ourunderstanding of human existence.


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Chapter 1 opens with a debate on the Cultural Revolution and askswhether it was ten years of catastrophe (shi nian haojie), who were ‘theChinese’ who were adversely affected by it, what were the causes of theviolence, and what was the extent of violence, whether there wereconstructive achievements during the Cultural Revolution and if so whatwere they, and what was the impact on Chinese culture and tradition.

This chapter argues that the Cultural Revolution, while very violent,was not a ten-year calamity for China; that the party and elite intelli-gentsia cannot speak on behalf of all Chinese; that the causes of violencewere many and the extent of violence has been exaggerated; that therewere many constructive and creative developments during the CulturalRevolution that have been ignored or denigrated by the post-CulturalRevolution narrative; and that the destruction of culture and traditionhas been exaggerated. Much of the discussion focuses on the debate overthe question of cultural and religious destruction in Tibet. A major argu-ment is that this was not a result of ethnic strife or Chinese chauvinismor imperialism, but due to the theory of class struggle and was justifiedby a Marxist interpretation of historical progression. In this regard, thischapter will render support to scholars such as Sautman (2006) whoargues that the Western world in particular has been hugely misled byclaims of the Tibetan exiles that ethnic or cultural genocide has beencommitted there, and that the same conception that should inform ouropinions about China generally applies with regard to Tibet. Thatconception is that the oppression of the old society was much morewidely experienced by its majority over many centuries than any of themistakes made during the course of transforming Tibetan society.

Chapter 2 develops the argument that memories are not onlyabout events, but also constitute a form of knowledge. The narrativeof atrocity of the Cultural Revolution is not just a retelling of pastexperience but also an act of identification with certain political andcultural values. From the literature of the wounded (or ‘scar litera-ture’) to the ‘calamities’ discourse of the Cultural Revolution, theretelling of the past can be seen as an act of political identificationwith certain hegemonic Western political and cultural values. It wasa neo-Enlightenment act to retrieve what was seen as being aban-doned by the May Fourth Movement: the striving for a Westernvision of humanism and democracy. Since the late 1990s the denunci-ation of the Cultural Revolution and the era of Mao has gone hand inhand with the discursive hegemony of neoliberalism. By analysingthe phenomenon of the ‘Two whatevers’ (whatever China does iswrong and whatever the United States does is right) among Chineseneoliberal dissidents, the chapter advances the argument for a corre-lation between the condemnation of socialist revolution and the elitedesire for political and cultural value identification with the West.


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Chapter 3 is an analytical review of memoirs, autobiographies andbiographies on the Mao era published in Chinese language. The litera-ture is vast and this is the first study that seeks to treat it as a whole.The chapter first draws a sketch of the literature. It then analysesseveral themes in light of traditional Chinese historiography andshows that the literature focuses on personal struggles and courtintrigues, while ignoring contentious political and socioeconomicissues in society at that time. The resulting ‘history’ justifies thosewriters’ present views and opinions but neglects many inconvenienthistorical facts. In this history, remembered personalities are oftenportrayed in a Peking opera style, analogous to pure good confrontingevil incarnate, and many legitimate memories which might have adifferent voice and different views are silenced.

Chapter 4 focuses on a critique of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’sbook Mao: The Unknown Story. It first summarizes how their book ispromoted by hype in the media. It then examines the book in detailand reveals how it misinterprets evidence, ignores the existing litera-ture, and makes sensationalist claims without proper evidence. It isargued that it is intellectually scandalous that the Chang and Hallidaybook has received so many positive reviews given the fact that itsscholarship is obviously questionable.

By presenting arguments and discussion in the e-media that areneither available in print and broadcast media nor accessible to thosewho do not read Chinese, and by in-depth analysis of claims made inthe Chang and Halliday book, the chapter reveals how the co-authorshave constructed a deeply misleading version of history. The chapterconcludes with a discussion of why such intellectual scandal matters tothe academic community.

As a counter-narrative to Chang and Halliday’s ‘constructed story’,Chapter 5 argues that there is a known and readily available story thatChang and Halliday chose to ignore. This is the story that givesprimacy to the Chinese people and to their part in the revolution ledby the CCP under Mao’s leadership, a revolution in which Chang’sparents participated, a revolution from which Chang herself benefited.It is a story that that does not deny or forget that it was due to this revo-lution that the average life expectancy of the majority Chineseincreased from 35 in 1949 to 63 by 1975, that it was a revolution thatbrought unity and stability to a nation tortured for so long by disunityand instability, and a revolution that laid the foundation for China tobecome the equal of the world’s great powers. It is a story about a revo-lution ‘of the people’ that enabled land reform, that promotedwomen’s status, that improved popular literacy and healthcare, andthat eventually transformed Chinese society beyond recognition fromits parlous state prior to the Revolution. In this connection the chapter


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dissects the comparison of Mao with Hitler, since Mao has beencompared to Hitler on many occasions. The chapter concludes byanalysing why Chang and Halliday are so universally popular in themainstream media in spite of scathing scholarly criticisms. It is arguedthat there are strong connections with the discourse of anti-revolution,including the French Revolution, which gained pre-eminence amidstthe triumph of market capitalism and liberal democracy.

Chapter 6 confronts the issue of the involvement by US academicsin the production of the memoirs of Li Zhisui, and questions the relia-bility and credibility of his book. The discrepancies between theChinese and English versions and the reasons behind these discrepan-cies are discussed in detail. By presenting evidence from publicationsthat repudiate the claims about and representations of Mao and theMao era, as presented by Li Zhisui, the chapter aims to show howmany of the claims Li makes are fraudulent. It is argued that theconstructed history in Li is history that is analogous with that which isseen and presented in Peking operas.

Chapters 7 and 8 present a ground-breaking study on Chineselanguage e-media debates about Mao, the Mao era and post-Maoreforms. Important events and issues such as the Cultural Revolution,the Great Leap Forward, the ideological dispute between Mao and LiuShaoqi, the Red Guard violence, the differences between the Red Guardsand Rebels, Jiang Qing the person, and the state of the economy aredebated by e-media participants. While Chapter 7 focuses on Mao theman and the Cultural Revolution, Chapter 8 is devoted to the state of theeconomy and other related issues. Chapter 8 presents the way farmersand urban workers feel and think about the Mao era in contrast to thepost-Mao reform period. Also discussed in Chapter 8 are case studies ofhow the anti-Maoist and anti-revolution discourse is constructed.

The two chapters basically argue that although the conventionaland mainstream media exercise a discursive hegemony by denouncingand condemning the Cultural Revolution in particular and the Mao erain general, there is growing evidence of a counter-response to thishegemony. There is clear evidence that the New Left critique of theneoliberal discursive hegemony is gaining ground rapidly as theeffects and consequences of the post-Mao reforms are more visibly andkeenly seen and felt within Chinese society.

Chapter 9 evaluates the rural situation from the mid-1980s up to2003. It focuses on the central Chinese rural heartland, as opposed tothe coastal provinces of Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong andFujian and the northwest poverty-stricken area of Shaanxi, Ningxia,Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Tibet. This central area includes Shanxi,Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Hebei, Yunnan and Sichuan.Three main sources of information are used: Chen and Chun (2004) on


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Anhui; Yu Jianrong (2003) on Hunan; and Gao (2005) on Jiangxi andShanxi. The study focuses on these provinces not only because thisarea is the rural heartland that contains a large portion of China’spopulation, but also because, from the perspective of income anddevelopment, it can be considered ‘middle ground’ between the moredeveloped southeast coast and the less developed northwest.

It is argued that even though many are better off in material termssuch as food and clothing in the post-Mao era, social problems aboundand the social fabric has been eroded by corruption, oppressive taxesand levies, crime and the unaffordable cost of education and health-care. For millions of Chinese from this rural heartland poverty is still aproblem, and the freedom of choice to work as a migrant is not neces-sarily an improvement in terms of quality of life and long-termwell-being. During the Mao era life was basic and austere, materialgoods were scarce, and there was hunger, but this was compensatedfor by a considerable measure of social equality, personal safety, and abetter education and healthcare system. The chapter discusses the formand content of resistance from rural China, and the way Maoist radi-calism has been an inspiration for rural resistance, thus providing acritical account of reaction to change in rural China since the reforms.This chapter advances the idea that the urban–rural divide and relateddiscriminatory policies against Chinese farmers are based on a devel-opmental discourse which induces a kind of development that isdetrimental to the environment and cannot be sustained.

Chapter 10 presents an overall evaluation of the post-Mao reforms inrelation to the legacy of the Mao era. This evaluation addresses the issueof how different parts of Chinese society experience life differently today.Its findings present a cautionary picture of mixed results, less rosy thanthat portrayed in the media. It also enters the discourse which askswhether China is a capitalist country or a socialist country with Chinesecharacteristics. In discussing these issues it first questions the premise ofsuch a dichotomy, and second, it asks whether and in what way theseissues matter to the life of the ordinary Chinese. In this chapter, the waystransnational companies exploit Chinese cheap labour and the effectsthis exploitation has on the global economy and life of the ordinaryChinese are discussed. In this connection the concept of comprador isemployed to explain the rise of the few rich who act as middlemen in thischain of capitalist globalization. The chapter furthers questions thesustainability of the current economic development model.

In the conclusion, legacies of the Mao era are further discussed andanalysed, however briefly, so as to highlight the conceptual frameworkthat binds various chapters of the book together: the way the past (theera of Mao) is understood depends on one’s values and beliefs in thepresent.


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1 Debating the Cultural Revolution

Introduction: who is writing history and who are the Chinese?

Total denegation of the Cultural Revolution has been China’s officialpolicy since the death of Mao, and the Cultural Revolution has beencondemned as a ten-year calamity for the Chinese people. But who arethe Chinese that the history of the Cultural Revolution is written aboutand who is writing this history? As I discuss in other chapters in thisbook, most memoirs, autobiographies and biographies about the periodare written by a section of the political and/or elite intelligentsia whowere the political targets of the Cultural Revolution. This section of thepolitical and intelligentsia elite often claims to be ‘the Chinese’ and isusually referred to as ‘the Chinese’. How about the ordinary Chinese, theurban workers and rural farmers who make up the majority of thepeople in China? How do they remember the Cultural Revolution? Thischapter aims to look into some of these questions.

Let me start with an account by Sun Ge of the Chinese Academy ofSocial Sciences to illustrate the issue. A couple of years back Sun (2007)gave a talk on the Cultural Revolution in South Korea. She thought shedid a good job by presenting a balanced and fair view of how itunfolded. When she finished a student from China in the audienceasked Sun a very pointed question: ‘What is your family background?’Sun admitted that both her parents were intellectuals who were victim-ized during the Cultural Revolution. Then the student said: ‘So nowonder. My father used to be the production team leader in my village.He still recalls the Cultural Revolution with fond memories becausethat was his most brilliant (canlan 灿烂) years. Those were years whenthe farmers felt proud and elated (yangmei tuqi 扬眉吐气).’ Sun wasshocked by the encounter and by the realization that there could beviews of the Cultural Revolution that were so different from hers.

Let me explain the difference by recalling an exhibition about theCultural Revolution organized by Stevan Harrell and David Davies atthe Burke Museum of Washington University (Seattle) in 2002, because itis very relevant to the question of who the Chinese are that we refer towhen we talk of the Cultural Revolution. The title of the Seattle exhibi-tion, ‘Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times’, is an apt description of theitems on display and of the theoretical orientation of the exhibition itself:the life of China’s ordinary people during a period of intense ideological

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ferment. Items such as cloth buttons, stamps, dresser drawers, and rice,oil, and meat coupons were indeed artefacts of daily life; and yet the waythese ordinary objects were made expressed extraordinary ideologicalcontent. The resulting combination of the ordinary and the extraordinaryis clearly illustrated by, for instance, the message ‘the masses of peoplehave unlimited creative powers’ that appeared on a bus ticket, an enve-lope that had the slogan ‘increase vigilance to defend the Motherland’written on it, a mirror table that carried the reminder ‘never forget classstruggle’, and cigarette packages that instructed smokers to ‘supportagriculture on a great scale’.

The Seattle exhibition deliberately avoided any interpretation orevaluation of the items on display or of the Cultural Revolution itself.Thus the display items were accompanied by little in the way ofcommentary; the objects themselves were expected to speak to theaudience. As if to further distance itself from evaluation, the exhibitionpresented the recollections of two people who voiced opposing posi-tions on the Cultural Revolution. The first recalled the CulturalRevolution with nostalgia, saying that Mao’s ideals were good for ‘usaverage people’, while the other indignantly condemned the CulturalRevolution as ‘barbaric’ and a period of ‘red terror’. That the exhibitiondid not take a conspicuous stand against the Cultural Revolutionclearly annoyed many visitors, if comments left in the guest book areany indication. Some accused the exhibit of trying to be ‘politicallycorrect’; others were frustrated that they left without any clear under-standing about whether the Cultural Revolution was good or bad;some registered their complaints that the exhibition was too positiveabout the Cultural Revolution. One unhappy visitor wrote twosentences in Chinese characters in the guest book, the first of whichdeclared that: ‘The ten years of the Cultural Revolution were a disasterfor the Chinese people.’

Along similar lines a couple of visitors, who identified themselvesas ‘American physicians’, wrote that when they visited China theyheard people describe their experiences of the Cultural Revolution as‘terrible’. Those American physicians suggested other visitors to readJung Chang’s Wild Swans and Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai.This is interesting and instructive because it indicates that Jung Changand Nien Cheng are standard references when the Mao era and theCultural Revolution are under consideration. It probably did not occurto those visitors that the exhibition was not meant to show that theclaims of people like Jung Chang and Nien Cheng had any legitimacy.The Chinese hosts of visiting American physicians might not view theCultural Revolution in the same way that an urban worker or a ruralfarmer would; nor would anyone classify Jung Chang and Nien Chengas ordinary. Visitors to the exhibition who came to Washington from


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China, either as tourists, students or migrants, and who complained (inChinese) that the exhibition was biased cannot be ordinary Chineseeither. These visitors used the general term Zhongguo renmin (theChinese people) as if their views represented those of everyone else inChina. They wrote that they themselves or family members or friendsof theirs had suffered an injustice because they were ‘sent down to thecountryside’ during the Cultural Revolution. As the majority ofChinese live and work in the countryside – and did so before andduring the Cultural Revolution – should not these critics pause andreflect before they declare that life in the countryside was inhumane?

The haojie discourse and the Cultural Revolution

It is therefore not surprising that some visitors questioned the morallegitimacy of a Cultural Revolution exhibition. One visitor askedwhether one could imagine an exhibition like this for Hitler, Stalin, orPol Pot. The assumption, of course, is that the Cultural Revolution wasa type of holocaust and that Mao was a monster like Hitler. This is animportant question – one that has to be faced by Western and Chineseacademics alike. The label Shi nian haojie is frequently used to refer tothe Cultural Revolution in the Chinese media, in conversations andeven in official Chinese documents. Shi nian means ten years, referringto the standard official Chinese periodization that the Cultural Revolu-tion lasted ten years. Haojie is ambiguous because it can be a modernterm for ‘holocaust’ or a traditional term to mean ‘great calamity’ or‘catastrophe’. Though ‘holocaust’ is not usually explicitly used in theWest to refer to the Cultural Revolution, the sections of the Chineseintelligentsia and political elite who go out of their way to denouncethe Cultural Revolution seem to be inclined to exploit the ambiguity ofhaojie to denigrate the Cultural Revolution. The CCP, under the direc-tion of Deng Xiaoping, adopted a resolution in 1981 on the history ofthe Mao era. In the resolution the Cultural Revolution is not referred toas a ten-year haojie; but, by judicially declaring that the ten years of theCultural Revolution were the period when Mao deviated from MaoZedong Thought, the resolution opened a door for total denigration.1

In her writings, Vera Schwarcz (1996 and 1998) specifically drawsour attention to the meaning of ‘holocaust’ in haojie when she talksabout the burden of the memory of the Cultural Revolution. Schwarczherself does not think a comparison of the Holocaust with the CulturalRevolution is appropriate. In this connection it is worth noting that anedited volume by Law (2003) is titled The Chinese Cultural RevolutionReconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust. The book does not set toprove the thesis that the Cultural Revolution was a holocaust, butcontains criticism that make implicit assumptions in that direction.

D E B AT I N G T H E C U LT U R A L R E V O L U T I O N

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More recently, in one of the most popular electronic publicationsproduced by Chinese dissidents, Cai Yingshen states that Mao wasChina’s Hitler and that the Cultural Revolution was the same as Nazifascism (Cai 2002). In Wild Swans, Jung Chang puts the Red Guards ona par with Hitler’s Storm Troopers.

The post-Mao Chinese authorities have been telling the Chinese andpeople all over the world that the Cultural Revolution was ten years ofcalamities and that China’s economy was brought to the brink ofcollapse during that period. However, when they first started theirjourney to abandon the Chinese revolution they could not afford to beseen as throwing away the whole package of China’s revolutionarylegacy. Their way of getting around this dilemma was to claim that theperiod of the Cultural Revolution, when most of them were out offavour, was an aberration and that the ideology of the Cultural Revo-lution, if there is any for them, was misguided. Along similar lines,most of the Chinese elite intelligentsia, who possess a dignified a senseof owning Chinese history, keep repeating that the Cultural Revolutionwas the darkest age of Chinese history (Ji Xianlin 1998).

The story propagated by the Chinese authorities and elite intelli-gentsia spreads fast and wide among the non-academic community inthe West. This of course has much to do with the legacy of the cold war,and the relentless push of democracy and a human rights agenda afterit. It was evident at the symposium sessions that took place during theSeattle exhibition that once the ‘holocaust’ meaning of haojie wasaccepted, anyone trying to say anything different about the CulturalRevolution ran the risk of being accused of holocaust denial. At leasttwo visitors accused the Burke Museum exhibition of being ‘politicallycorrect’ though the ‘political correct’ line both in and outside China isactually to condemn the Cultural Revolution.

There’s no doubt that many suffered and died during the ten-yearperiod. Some committed suicide, others died in factional fighting orafter being tortured. Some died because of the harshness of theircircumstances, and the lives of others were shortened as a result oftheir experiences during the Cultural Revolution. I myself was putunder house arrest when I was only a teenager and had to face strugglesessions every night for two weeks for what now seem ridiculousreasons. My whole family was affected as a result (Gao 1999a). Denun-ciation and condemnation of the Cultural Revolution by those whosuffered in one way or another is understandable and can be an indi-vidual’s way to cope and heal the emotional trauma. However, toparticipate in the official project of reducing every thing to the label of‘ten years of calamities’ is another matter.

Here I give just one example. One recent piece on the widely readChinese-language electronic journal Huaxia wenzhai (Chinese Digest),


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which regularly publishes documents and writings on the CulturalRevolution, featured a partial list of well-known people who diedduring the so-called Cultural Revolutionary period of 1966–76. Theauthor asserts that all of the people on his list died as a result of perse-cution during the Cultural Revolution (Dai Huang 2002). Along withsuch names as Liu Shaoqi, there were also Zhu De, the legendary RedArmy commander, and Xu Guangping, widow of Lu Xun, who hadbeen hailed as a cultural icon by Mao and his followers. There is noevidence that either Zhu De or Xu Guangping was persecuted at thattime. But the widely accepted assumption is that because the CulturalRevolution was a ten-year catastrophe any well-known personalitywho died during the period must have died from persecution.

Violence, brutality and causes

Certainly there was violence, cruelty and destruction, but how shouldwe interpret what happened during that period? Were all the acts ofviolence organized and intended by official policies, as was the caseduring the Nazi Holocaust? Was there a plan to physically exterminatea group of people, as in Hitler’s gas chambers? The violence, cruelty,suffering and deaths that occurred during the initial years of theCultural Revolution were caused by different groups of people, fordifferent reasons. Some conflicts were of a class nature, others weresocial in character; some of the violence involved personal grudges, inother cases the violence was due to blindness, ignorance and stupidity.

The fact that there was no planned policy for violence can be seenin the sequence of events in those years. Recognizing the terribleconsequences of the ‘Red Terror’ in 1966 – when in Beijing homeswere raided, people judged to be class enemies were beaten up, anddetention centres were set up – and determined to stop furtherterror of this kind, the central committee of the CCP approved adecree drafted by the CCP of the Beijing Municipality and issued itto the whole of China on 20 November 1966. The zhongyao tonggao(important notification) decreed that no factory, mine, school,administration or any other unit should be allowed to establish adetention house or makeshift court to persecute anyone. Any viola-tion of the decree would be a violation of the law of the state and ofdisciplines of the CCP and would be punished accordingly (XiaoXidong 2002). It is true that documents like this did not stop theviolence completely; it is also true that verbal provocations, gesturesand instructions by Mao and other leaders incited a new type ofviolence in early 1967 and at later times. Yet the official policy wasclear: yao wendou bu yao wudou (engage in the struggle with wordsbut not with physical attack). This policy was recorded in an official


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Cultural Revolution document, the ‘Shiliu tiao’ (the 16 Articles) andwas stressed in speeches from time to time by various leaders.Neither the so-called 1967 January Storm (yiyue fengbao) that origi-nated in Shanghai and encouraged the Rebels to take over powerfrom the CCP apparatus, nor the suppression of the so-called 1967February Anti-Cultural Revolution Current (eyue niliu) were meantto include physical fighting and certainly not physical elimination,though both did lead to violence of various kinds.

Much of the violence, brutality and destruction that happenedduring the ten-year period was indeed intended, such as the persecu-tion of people with a bad class background at the beginning, and lateraction against the Rebels, but the actions did not stem from a singlelocus of power. To use ‘Storm Troopers’ in reference to the RedGuards, for instance, is conveniently misleading. There was no suchsingular entity as the ‘Red Guards’ or the ‘Red Guard’. First, we mustdifferentiate between university students and school students. It wasthe latter who invented the term ‘Red Guards’ and who engaged inacts of senseless violence in 1966. We should also note the differencebetween schoolchildren in Beijing, where many high-ranking CCPofficials and army officers were located, and those in other placessuch as Shanghai, the home town of three of the so-called ‘Gang ofFour’ radicals. It was not in Shanghai, the supposed birthplace of theCultural Revolution radicals, but in Beijing that schoolchildren beatup their teachers most violently. It was also in Beijing (in 1966) thatthe children of high-ranking CCP members and army officials formedthe notorious Lian dong (Coordinated Action) and carried out the so-called ‘Red Terror’ in an effort to defend their parents. What theywere doing was exactly the opposite of what Mao wanted, to‘bombard the capitalist roaders inside the Party’, that is, parents ofthe Lian dong Red Guards. Lian dong activists behaved like those ofthe Storm Troopers, but these were not Mao’s Storm Troopers. Maosupported those Rebels who criticized CCP officials including theparents of the Lian dong Red Guards. These facts can easily beconfirmed by documentary evidence; yet the post-Mao Chinese polit-ical and elite intelligentsia either pretend not to see them or choose toignore them.

Violence such as the Qingli jieji duiwu (Cleaning up the Class Ranks)movement in 1968 was premeditated, but this movement was notmeant to result in the physical elimination of ‘class enemies’, thoughthis clearly happened in some places. In any case, much of the violencethat took place during the later 1960s was not initiated by either theRed Guards or the Rebels. In fact many of the Rebels became victimsthemselves, in campaigns such against the May the Sixteenth Elements(Yang and McFadden 1997).


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Constructive policies

All the documentary evidence (more details in later chapters) suggeststhat the initial intention of the Cultural Revolution by Mao, theChairman of the CCP, was to teach an ideological lesson to the officialswithin the CCP. Emotional humiliation was intended, but physicalviolence was not. While the Cultural Revolution radicals wanted to stirup more movements for change, the pre-Cultural Revolution establish-ment wanted to maintain the status quo. As Mao’s plan of regeneratingthe CCP unfolded, new developments emerged and unforeseenviolence of one kind led to another. If anything the CCP under the lead-ership of Mao, and chiefly managed by Zhou Enlai, tried hard tocontrol violence. Eventually the army had to be brought in to maintainorder. By 1969, a little more than two years after the start of theCultural Revolution the political situation was brought under controland China’s economic growth was back on track.

From then on, new socioeconomic policies were gradually intro-duced and these had a positive impact on a large number of people;these policies were intentionally designed. These included the creationof a cheap and fairly effective healthcare system, the expansion ofelementary education in rural China, and affirmative-action policiesthat promoted gender equality. Having grown up in rural China, Iwitnessed the important benefits that these policies had for the ruralpeople. When the post-Mao regime under Deng Xiaoping reversed theCultural Revolution policies on these issues, the systems and practicesthat had benefited the vast majority of China’s rural people wereallowed (and, in some cases, pushed) to disintegrate. In terms of healthand education many of the rural poor became worse off than they hadbeen during the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, many of the gainsmade in achieving gender equality have been lost.

The ‘positives’ should also include developments in China’s mili-tary defence, industry and agriculture. The politically correct lineannounces that the Chinese economy was brought to the brink ofcollapse during the Cultural Revolution. However, documentaryevidence and special studies of the period (Meisner 1986, Lardy 1978,Rawski 1980 and 1993, Endicott 1989, Bramall 1993, Chow 1985,Perkins 1985, Field 1986, Hinton 1983, and Gao 1999a) all demonstratethat this was not the case. True, China’s economy was disrupted in1967 and 1968, but throughout the rest of the late 1960s and through allof the 1970s China’s economy showed consistent growth. Even US offi-cial estimates had to acknowledge this state of affairs. In one officialreport a Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress (1978) statesthat in the era of Mao China’s economy had a ‘record of positivegrowth in both agriculture and industry’, that Mao and his fellow


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leaders ‘had already created a significant economic base for the new[post-Mao] leadership to build on’, and that the economic impact of theCultural Revolution overall was not huge. It is also worth pointing outthat the development of she dui qiye (commune and production brigadeenterprises) during the Cultural Revolution were the forerunners ofthe xiangzhen qiye (township and village enterprises) developed inpost-Mao China.

When someone kills someone else we usually judge the case to bemurder if the action was intentional; otherwise it is a case ofmanslaughter. Therefore, determining what is designed and what isintended is important in evaluating the responsibility for actions. Agood test case would be to compare China, the largest communistcountry, with India, the largest democracy, using labels for conven-ience. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen makes thepoint that, although India never suffered a ‘politically induced famine’like the Great Leap Forward in China:

[India] had, in terms of morbidity, mortality and longevity,suffered an excess in mortality over China of close to 4 [million]a year during the same period. … Thus, in this one geographicalarea alone, more deaths resulted from ‘this failed capitalistexperiment’ (more than 100 million by 1980) than can be attrib-uted to the ‘failed communist experiment’ all over the worldsince 1917.

(Black 2000)

This interpretation may be disturbing to some and uncomfortable toothers, but Sen’s argument does show that it is important to distin-guish between what was intended and what was not intended duringthe Cultural Revolution.

Destruction of Chinese culture and tradition

Another issue to consider is the extent of destruction of Chineseculture and tradition during the Cultural Revolution. It is commonlythought that the Cultural Revolution was not only iconoclastic but alsobarbaric in its destruction of Chinese culture. The Cultural Revolutionslogan po si jiu (break the four olds – old ideas, old customs, old cultureand old habits) certainly adds conceptual weight to this perception.The perception in the West, especially in the non-academic community,that everything traditional in China was destroyed is often reinforcedby the grotesque pictures and photos of Red Guards burning booksand destroying religious temples and historical relics.

There is no dispute that there were many instances of destruction of


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this kind. However it is important to determine, first, whether thedestruction was universal and, second, whether it was the officialpolicy of the Cultural Revolution to destroy physical objects. Despiteevery effort by the Chinese authorities to denounce the Cultural Revo-lution, no evidence has ever been put forward to support charges thatphysical destruction was officially organized or sanctioned. On thecontrary, the official policy at the time was to protect cultural relicsfrom wanton destruction. For instance, on 14 May 1967 the CCP centralcommittee issued a document entitled Guanyu zai wuchanjieji wenhua dageming zhong baohu wenwu tushu de jidian yijian (Several suggestions forthe protection of cultural relics and books during the Cultural Revolu-tion) to protect traditional cultural institutions and relics. It isnoteworthy, as well, that archaeological discoveries of historical signif-icance such as the Terracotta Army and Mawangdui tombs in Hunanprovince made during this period have been well-preserved. In fact thenumber of archaeological discoveries (including the Terracotta Armydiscovered in 1974) was very high and their preservation was swift andeffective during the period.

It has to be pointed out that tension between maintenance anddestruction of tradition has existed in China for thousands of years; itis not just the so-called communist regime that had to face thisproblem. Two examples will be sufficient to illustrate this point. First,many aspects of Chinese tradition were abandoned or destroyed by theChinese themselves but preserved in a modified way by the Japaneseinstead. Second, since the May Fourth Movement at the beginning ofthe twentieth century, anti-tradition has been held up as a beacon formodernization for ‘progressive’ Chinese of all political persuasions.This is generally understood to be the ‘Enlightenment’.

It is true that the leaders of the PRC, in general, and of the CulturalRevolution, in particular, did encourage a more radical ideology ofanti-Chinese tradition. However, they tried at the same time topreserve some aspects of it. It was Mao who said the Chinese tradi-tional medicine was a treasure house that needed to be exploited (Mao1958). It was during the Cultural Revolution period that Chinese medi-cine was intensively supported by official policies. The use ofacupuncture-induced anaesthesia was promoted during the CulturalRevolution and many foreign visitors were invited to observe the useof surgical operations at that time.

It was among the Mawangdui discoveries that the earliest knownaccount of the medical properties of the plant qinghao was unearthed,along with other cultural relics. The Chinese worked from 1967onwards to screen ‘a broad range of compounds drawn from tradi-tional medicine’, but it was in 1971 that they developed an unusualextraction method that isolated what is called qinghaosu (artemisinin),


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the drug that ‘is now recognized as the world’s best hope for amalaria cure’ (Lange 2002). It is worth pointing out here that DavidLange, who trumpeted this scientific breakthrough – quoting HongKong University’s Richard Haynes as saying that ‘there has got to bea Nobel Prize here somewhere’ – subtitled his report: ‘A Little-knownTale of Scientific Intrigue: Post-Cultural Revolution ResearchersUsing Rudimentary Equipment Unearthed What Is Now Recognizedas the World’s Best Hope for a Malaria Cure.’ Contrary to the head-line, the content of Lange’s report shows clearly that this discoverywas made during the Cultural Revolution and the poster that accom-panies his report confirms this as well: the caption in Chinese belowa large figure of a female scientist (an example of China’s affirmativepolicy to promote gender equality during the Cultural Revolution)reads ‘kexue you xianzu ku zhan neng guo guan’ (there are dangerousobstacles in sciences; but with a bitter fight we can surpass them), atypical Cultural Revolution poster. It is clear that Lange eitherconsciously or unconsciously made the decision not to report theCultural Revolution in a positive light.

There’s no doubt that artists and cultural professionals were perse-cuted and stopped from working – especially during the early periodof the Cultural Revolution. However, efforts were also made to restorecultural activities. Radicals at the time were trying to find a newapproach toward literature and art. Take the case of the Peking opera.Thanks largely to the efforts of artists such as Yu Huiyong (whocommitted suicide after he was arrested by the post-Mao regime) themodel Peking operas had some amazing achievements in those years.The artistic technique and skills in music, acting and language devel-oped at that time were the highest of their kind and have not beensurpassed since. According to Zhang Guangtian (2002), a playwrightand director who has made a huge impact on the stage in recent years,model Peking operas created during the Cultural Revolution were notonly revolutionary in content but also in artistic form, a revolutionequivalent to the Anhui Troup’s performance in Peking two centuriesago (Guo Jingrui 2002). Zhang argues that the characteristics of theperforming art of Peking opera, that is, the formalism and style ofsimplification and concision, were raised to their highest level duringthe Cultural Revolution. Zhang further argues that by making use ofWestern wind and string instruments and by combining them withtraditional Chinese musical instruments, and by wedding the art ofWestern ballet with that of the Peking opera, the model Peking operasnot only developed a theoretical framework for managing change andcontinuity in the Chinese theatre, but also demonstrated a successfuleffort to counter the seemingly unstoppable tide of Western culturalimperialism.


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I witnessed an unprecedented surge of cultural and sports activitiesin my own home town, Gao Village. The villagers, for the first time inthe village’s history, organized a theatre troupe and put on perform-ances that incorporated the contents and structure of the model Pekingoperas with local language and music. The villagers not only enter-tained themselves but also learned how to read and write by gettinginto the texts and plays. And they organized sports meets and heldmatches with other villages. All these activities gave the villagers anopportunity to meet, communicate and even fall in love. These activi-ties during the Cultural Revolution years gave them a sense ofdiscipline and organization and created a public sphere where meet-ings and communications went beyond the traditional household andvillage clans. This had never happened before and it has neverhappened since (Gao 1999a).

Another aspect of the Cultural Revolution that has so far beenlargely neglected by Western academics is the multiplication of semi-official, unofficial and underground cultural activities during these daminzhu (great democracy) years. According to one estimate, forinstance, more than 10,000 different newspapers and pamphlets werepublished during the Cultural Revolution (Chen Donglin and Du Pu1994). There were more than 900 publications in Beijing alone.According to Chen, even Mao paid attention to these publications andthe official People’s Daily reprinted articles from some of the publica-tions. Western academics have made and still do make use of theso-called Red Guard publications to assess China, the CCP, and theCultural Revolution. There was unprecedented freedom of associationand freedom of expression, though in non-institutionalized ways.

Religion and minority cultures: with a special focus on Tibet

As indicated above, modernity and the Enlightenment project havebeen attacking Chinese tradition for more than a century. As in anycountry, religious beliefs are an important part of tradition that hasbeen under attack by modernity. On top of and as part of modernity,an important part of the Enlightenment project has been the Marxistideology, which is known to have been hostile to religion. The extentand degree of religious destruction in the PRC in general and duringthe Cultural Revolution in particular is undoubtedly serious.

Tibetan culture bore the full blunt of this ideological onslaughtbecause its culture is so closely intertwined with religion. It is under-standable therefore that there has been outrage against this kind ofdestruction. However, how to write and read history in this case is,again, another matter. Reflections by Wang Lixiong, a Chinese experton Tibet, are worthy of some discussion here. In one of his publications


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in English, Wang disputes the claim that 1) the destruction of Tibetantemples during the Cultural Revolution was by Chinese Red Guards,and 2) that it was part of the CCP’s ‘systematic, methodical, calculated,planned and comprehensive destruction’ (Donnet 1994: 81). Instead,Wang argues that ‘only a limited number of Han [ethnic Chinese] RedGuards actually reached Tibet. Even if some did participate indestroying temples, their actions could only have been symbolic’(Wang Lixiong 2002: 97) for, as Wang argues, most of the destructionwas done by Rebels of Tibetan ethnic origin. The destruction of Tibetanculture, just like the destruction of Chinese traditional culture, has tobe discussed in relation to the complicated and painful process ofmodernization and China’s official ideology of Marxism.

Furthermore, Wang argues that the Chinese authorities were tryingto rein in the wanton destruction in Tibet:

The authorities in Tibet often tried to restrain radical actions,with the PLA [People’s Liberation Army], for example, consis-tently supporting the more conservative factions against therebels. Temples and monasteries survived best in the centralcities and areas where the authorities could still exercise somecontrol. In contrast, the Gandan Monastery, some 60 kilometresoutside Lhasa and one of the three major centres of the YellowHat sect, was reduced to ruins.

(Wang 2002: 97)

This description fits well with the general picture all over China: there wasfactional fighting between radical and conservative forces, the authoritiestried to reduce the destructive consequences of the ideological ferment,and the PLA tended to support the authorities.

Of course not everyone agrees with Wang, as can be seen in TseringShakya’s response (Shakya 2002), which is a spirited defence of Tibetancultural and religious tradition and a passionate cry for Tibetan nation-alism. Shakya’s criticism of Wang’s speculation about Tibetan psychol-ogy is, to me, entirely justifiable and convincing. Wang basically arguesthat because of the harsh conditions and the overwhelming power ofnature on the Tibetan high plateau, the people residing there are moreinclined to beliefs in supernatural forces and darkness of nature. In amost charitable interpretation this is a kind of geographical determin-ism, like Wittfogel’s argument that the nature and scale of rice agricul-ture induced bureaucratic despotism in China, that lacks solid evidence,and is un-falsifiable. Wang’s argument, like Wittfogel’s, does smell of anorientalist who peeps into the mind of the ‘other’.

However I don’t think Shakya is fair in some other criticisms ofWang, such as that Wang has a colonial attitude towards the Tibetans.


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Wang in fact is very critical of the Chinese regime and actually arguesthat the present Chinese religious policy is destroying TibetanBuddhism (Wang 2003) and that the Chinese presence in Tibet and theway Tibet is run by the Chinese is a kind of imperialism (Wang 2004).Wang is one of the few mainland Chinese scholars who actually triesto argue that the Chinese claim that Tibet is historically part of Chinais at least open to dispute.

Shakya has reasonable grounds to claim that the Chinese presencein Tibet is a form of imperialism or colonialism. However, we have tomake a crucial difference between what we may term Chinese imperi-alism and Western imperialism elsewhere, or the British imperialism inIndia and Tibet, for a number of reasons. The first reason is that Chinaand Tibet have had a long historical relationship because of geograph-ical proximity. You can call it suzerainty or tributary or whateverrelationship, but there is a long historical relationship and thereforethere are areas that were already part of Chinese provinces before theCommunist takeover where both Tibetans and non-Tibetans, includingHan Chinese, have been living together for generations. The secondreason is that:

No major state recognized ‘de facto independent’ Tibet becauseChina had a claim to sovereignty. A United States State Depart-ment spokesman noted in 1999 that since 1942 the United Stateshas regarded Tibet as part of China, and during the 1940sUnited States actions repeatedly affirmed that view.

(Sautman 2001: 278)

Let us remember that this US acknowledgement was not made in theseventeenth or eighteenth century when colonialism was rife but in the1940s when nationhood, national liberation and national independencewere the main features of the day and when the CCP had yet to take overpower in China. Therefore, it is hard to sustain an argument that theCommunist regime was a colonialist that invaded an independent state.

The second reason why the PRC was not colonialist in the tradi-tional sense is that as an ethnic group the Tibetan population hasincreased under the current Chinese control. While the Chinesegovernment has implemented a family planning policy to controlChina’s population, it has much more lenient policies towards ethnicminorities, including Tibetans. This is in contrast to what Western colo-nialists have done. As Sautman points out, under Western colonialismthe colonized perished in droves through famine, disease and repres-sion while colonial settlers gained demographically. This happened inAmerica, where native Americans lost up to 95 per cent of their popu-lation, and in Australia, where the aboriginal Australians have almost


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been wiped out. In Tibet, however, ethnic Tibetans ‘have proliferatedon a scale never before experienced by that ethnic group’ (Sautman2001: 281).

Our main concern here is not about historical claims of sovereigntybut about destruction of Tibetan religious life during the Cultural Revo-lution. While Wang admits the seriousness of the destruction andcondemns it, Shakya also admits to Wang’s argument that the destruc-tion was largely done by people of Tibetan ethnic origin. What Shakyaargues, and is therefore critical of Wang for failing to realize, is that thedestruction of religious institutions in Tibet during the Cultural Revolu-tion was a logical consequence of Chinese colonialism and that Tibetansparticipated in the destruction because they were either coerced orbrainwashed. On the other hand, Wang explains Tibetan participation inthe destruction of their own religious institutions by arguing that theseTibetans believed in Mao and his ideas and even took Mao as their god.What underlies Wang’s argument is the theory of class and class strug-gle: lower-class Tibetans responded in the way they did during theCultural Revolution because Mao was perceived to have changed theirlives by a revolution of land reform and emancipation of slaves.

In the context of the two explanations it is worth spending sometime to discuss the contents of a book recently published in Taiwan.The book is an edited version of interviews with people living in Tibet,mostly Tibetans, about the Cultural Revolution. The author Wei Se2 isa PRC citizen of Tibetan ethnic origin who has been banned andcensored by the Chinese authorities. The book is a result of severalyears’ work and consists of a selection of 23 interviews out of morethan 70 that she had conducted. It is also worth noting that the authoris aware of both Wang’s and Shakya’s arguments, and the Chineseversions of both their articles are included as appendix in the book.

One of the chief aims of Wei Se was to find out why Tibetans partic-ipated in the destruction of their own religion. As Wei Se (2006) statesin her preface to the book, both Wang’s and Shakya’s views and argu-ments are confirmed by these interviewees. However, from myreading, the evidence and arguments coming out of this book as awhole are tipped more towards Wang’s interpretation and under-standing. According to the interview with her mother, Wei Se’s fatherwas very enthusiastic at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution andhe loved Mao ( 2006: 85). Another interviewee states that at that time‘belief in the CCP was like belief in religion’ (2006: 95, 97, 98). Anotherinterviewee says that he really believed Mao was right and manyothers did as well (2006: 167). Another Tibetan who used to be aservant of one of the religious teachers of the Dalai Lama also statesthat he likes Mao because Mao respects the Dalai Lama, and becauseMao supports the poor. He reaffirms that at that time medical services


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were good for the poor people, and the first thing he said when herecovered from a hospital operation was ‘long live Chairman Mao’(2006: 225). Another Tibetan says that at that time people believed thatMao was a living Buddha (2006: 268), and thinks that there are stillmany Tibetans who, having been liberated by Mao’s revolution, havethe same feelings for Mao (2006: 271). A former serf declares thatwithout the CCP there would not have been a life for serfs like him(2006: 292). Another interviewee, the son of a well-known livingBuddha and the most outstanding Tibetan photographer, states hereally believed in Mao and thought everything said by Mao was theuniversal truth. In the 1980s when he was received by His Holiness theDalai Lama (outside China) he told his Holiness that it was the truththat the majority of the Tibetans supported the CCP because the CCPreally liberated the serfs (2006: 329). The first interviewee, an ordinaryTibetan woman in Lhasa, states that Mao helped a lot of people, thatthe world cannot do without people like Mao, that Tibet used to beunfair when some were rich while some did not have enough to eatand that Mao’s revolution changed everything (2006: 21).

Many of the interviewees hold that there was not much ethnicconflict in the era of Mao. One interviewee of Hui ethnic backgroundstates that the Hans and the Tibetans were the same in making revolu-tion (Wei Se 2006: 181). Other interviewees affirm the idea that thedominant discourse was class struggle and the words on every one’slips were qin bu qin jieji fen: whether one feels close to another dependson class (2006: 166, 190). A Tibetan interviewee who used to be a neigh-bourhood committee leader is very upset by the current Chinese policyof giving so much privilege to Tibetans who belonged to the formerruling class (2006: 229). Finally the majority of the interviewees, whenquestioned, affirm that it was the Tibetan activists of the neighbour-hood committees, not the Red Guards, who did most of the damage inreligious destruction. These activists were mostly from poor socialbackgrounds and some of them were considered by some intervieweesto be rascals, thieves and thugs.

The interview findings by Wei Se give support to scholars likeSautman who refutes the claims of cultural genocide in Tibet (Sautman2001, 2006) that was supposedly carried out by the Chinese. It is onrecord that on 15 October 1966 the Chinese Premier Zhou tried topersuade a group of eleven Tibetan students to go slow in destroyingthe four olds because, he said, the wiping out of superstition requiresa long-term transformation; he suggested that temples and monas-teries should not be destroyed because they can be converted toschools or store houses (Ho 2006). One example illustrates the verydelicate and yet complex situation at that time: when activists went todestroy the Juela Temple in the autumn of 1966, the resident lama


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Mimaciren refused to open the gates, but his own son Lobu climbedonto the wall and opened the main door from inside. (Ho 2006: 80)

Cultural Revolution and cultural creativity

The accusation of destruction of culture and tradition has overshad-owed the achievements of cultural creativity during the CulturalRevolution. Take the example of the fine arts. During the CulturalRevolution years of 1972 to 1975 China held four national fine artsexhibitions, with more than 2,000 pieces of art selected from 12,800works recommended from all over China. The exhibits in Beijingattracted an audience of 7.8 million, a scale never reached before theCultural Revolution (Lu Hong 2002). According to Lu, the four exhibi-tions showed three characteristics: new ideological content, newsubject matters and the rise of amateur artists (65 per cent of exhibitedworks were created by amateurs). These artworks included oil paint-ings, Chinese traditional paintings, print paintings, sculpture, SpringFestival paintings (nian hua), picture storybook paintings (lianhuanhua), charcoal drawings, watercolours and paper cuts. Among theeducated youth sent down to the countryside were several accom-plished artists who found inspiration in their lives and work in ruralChina. These include Liu Borong, Xu Qunzong, He Shaojiao, ShenJiawei, Zhao Xiaomo, Li Jianguo, You Jingdong, Zhao Yanchao, ChenXinmin, He Boyi and Xu Kuang. In addition to the much-publicizedRent Collection Courtyard (Shouzu yuan) – which was conceived before1966 but finalized during the Cultural Revolution – large-scale groupsculptures of revolutionary subject matter also reached its peak ofartistic form during this period (Wang Mingxian and Yan Shechun2001). Works of this type include Hongweibing zan (Song of praise of theRed Guard), Kongjun zhanshi jiashi (Family history of an Air Forcesoldier), Mao zhuxi wuchan jieji geming luxian shengli wansui (Long livethe victory of Chairman Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line), andNongnu fen (Anger of the slaves). One might hate the content of thiskind of art, one might even hate its form: but to say that there was noartistic creativity during the Cultural Revolution is to create a myth.

Another myth created and accepted, at least by the non-academiccommunity, in the West is that during the Cultural Revolution peoplewere forbidden to read anything except Mao’s little Red Book. Thisportrayal of China as a cultural wasteland is absolutely false. By 1976there were 542 official magazines and journals and 182 newspapers incirculation throughout China; the number of cinemas or film units hadincreased from 20,363 in 1965 to 86,088 in 1976; cultural clubs hadincreased from 2,598 to 2,609; public libraries, from 577 to 768; andmuseums, from 214 to 263 (Qiu Desheng et al. 1993). Only theatre


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troupes saw a drop in their numbers during the Cultural Revolution,from 3,458 in 1965 to 2,906 in 1976. But these figures do not include theunregistered unofficial theatre troupes that were created and active inrural China, like the one I experienced in Gao Village.

More importantly, educated youth and many other Chinese readmany literary works that they were not supposed to read, such as worksby Russian writers, revolutionary or otherwise (Wang Jianzhao 2002).They not only read extensively but they also created their own literature.Artists like Mang Ke and Duo Duo, both now known in the West, wroteand worked creatively during the Cultural Revolution. Others includeBei Dao, Yan Li, Yan Xiaoqing, Peng Gang, Shi Baojia and Yue Zhong.Another example of collective creativity is the Han Ying cidian(Chinese–English Dictionary) compiled by a group of academics whoworked collectively at the Beijing Foreign Language Institute for tenyears. First published in 1978, the dictionary, in my opinion, remains thebest of its kind inside or outside China, past or present.

The objects on display at the exhibition in Seattle are evidence thatthere was an upsurge of creativity among the popular masses duringthe Cultural Revolution. The chopsticks holder, for instance, is a beau-tiful piece of art. It is itself made of chopsticks and reflects thetremendous resourcefulness of the labouring Chinese. It is cheap tomake and it is practical. Moreover, it cleverly combines the content(chopsticks holder) with the form (chopsticks). If we treasure art andartefacts that have been inspired by religions – institutions with brutaland murderous records – and if we value modern artefacts that aredriven by commercialism, then I do not see why we should denigratethe value of art from the Chinese Cultural Revolution just because itcame out of a political movement. Culture is not an abstract entity. It islived experience and creative activities. By living their ordinary livesthe ordinary Chinese may continue practising what has been passedon, but they may also cut ties with their past. They may want to set upnew practices for their future. In the midst of all the change and conti-nuity, culture was destroyed and culture was created, as the displaysin the Burke Museum exhibition show.

If we accept the truth that the Cultural Revolution was ten years ofcatastrophe, then there is no room for voices that differ from those ofthe Chinese authorities and the Chinese elite intelligentsia whocondemn the Cultural Revolution and who exploit the holocaustdiscourse (Sahlins 1985) to construct the Cultural Revolution history.The best example of how the Cultural Revolution history isconstructed can be seen how the Cultural Revolution is ‘remembered’.As it is true in the case of other histories, the history of the CulturalRevolution is ‘in its telling’ (Taussig 1989). But who is doing thetelling? Who remembers what? Who is allowed to voice her/his


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memory? Who is able to tell her/his memories either orally or in print?What channels and space of memories are provided by whom, forwhom? Answers to these questions will be provided in later chapters.

What is the Enlightenment?

In contrast to early Western anthropologists, who took their theories toexotic places in order to interpret exotic societies, the Chinese expatri-ates, who are financially supported and academically or politicallymentored by the West, do not ‘tend to situate themselves more on theship of (capitalist) history than on the shore’(Ortner 1984: 143), butrather depart the airport lounge of China on a plane to the West toreceive instruction about the history of the Cultural Revolution as, forinstance, Dr Li Zhisui did in recounting the private life of ChairmanMao (as discussed in a later chapter).

When talking about the Cultural Revolution and about their ownexperiences of being victimized, and then comparing how the USgovernment treats its own people so humanely, for instance in its care-ful and persistent efforts in recovering and honouring its MIAs in Viet-nam, some Chinese elite intelligentsia laud the American practice ofhuman rights. The element missing in this humanitarian discourse is anyconsideration of the fact that millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians andLaotians who were killed or bombed to dust were also human beings.While we should support the right of US Vietnam veterans to demandcompensation for their suffering as a consequence of their participationin Agent Orange warfare, we should not forget what happened to thereal targets of this warfare, the millions of Vietnamese who suffered andare still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange.

Those who condemn the Cultural Revolution are still framing theirdenunciations in the ideological paradigm of Western Enlightenment.As Wang Hui argues, if we use this Enlightenment discourse as a basisof evaluation, then not only does the Chinese tradition stand to becondemned, but all contemporary social practice in the PRC should bedenied any moral legitimacy (Wang Hui 2000). According to this yard-stick, anything happens in China, past or contemporary, is onlytransitional until and unless China becomes part of the West in polit-ical system and cultural values (Sun Ge 2007). We will continue thisdiscussion in the next chapter.


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2 Constructing history: memories, values and identity

Introduction: speech act of identification

Ever since the late 1980s, memoirs, autobiographies and biographieshave overwhelmingly stigmatized at the Cultural Revolution as tenyears of chaos, calamities or even holocaust. In this influx of remem-bering, in contemporary China the Chinese appear to have awokenfrom a nightmare after which justice is sought, wounds are to behealed, the bad and evil are condemned, and the good and reasonableare endued with power and glory. In this enterprise of remembering,the past memories have a moral as well as a truth claim. But can tenyears’ lived experience during the Cultural Revolution years bereduced to a bad dream? What were so many millions of intelligentand reasonable Chinese thinking and doing in these years?

An answer that is constantly on offer is that the Chinese were eitherbrutally suppressed and/or brainwashed by a Communist regime ledby a power-hungry dictator. In contrast to this cold war interpretation,and based on the assumption that the Chinese were no less reasonablethen and no less brainwashed now, this chapter argues that the moraland truth claims of this remembering of the Cultural Revolution arenecessarily constructions. Inspired by Ricoeur’s ideas of memories,forgetfulness and identity, I propose that memory is not a thing that isrecalled, but an act of identity. According to what Ricoeur calls ‘narra-tive identity’, to tell a story of one’s life is to make sense of it (Popkin2005). But one needs a conceptual framework to organize the story sothat sense can be made of. It is argued in this chapter that the concep-tual framework in post-Mao China that organizes Chinese memories isdominantly the contemporary version of qimeng (Enlightenment), thatis, liberal democracy and market capitalism. According to this concep-tual framework, anything that happens in China, past or present, isonly transitional until and unless China becomes part of the West in itspolitical system and cultural values.

Memories are not only about the past, but also constitute a form ofknowledge. The narrative of atrocity of the Cultural Revolution is notjust a retelling of past experience but also a speech act of political iden-tity. In the early stage of the development of this narrative, to retellCultural Revolution atrocities was to rehearse the political speech act

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of the May Fourth Movement of Enlightenment. Later, since the 1990s,as the cold war appeared to come to an end and as market capitalismtook root in China, the narrative developed further towards the polit-ical act of identification with the neo-Enlightenment of liberaldemocracy and market capitalism. It is this act of identifying withdominant political and cultural values in the West that orientates theremembering of the Cultural Revolution.

What is the departure point of those who want to identify with theglobally dominant political and cultural values? While the Japanese whowanted to identify with the West (out of Asia and into Europe) took theirdeparture from the ugly Asia, Michel de Certeau’s conceptualization of‘place’, the Chinese who want to identify with liberal democracy and thevalues of market capitalism take their departure from ‘time’, their uglypast, including the very recent past. To the Japanese then, ‘to kill theChinese is throwing off Asia in every conceivable way’ because Chinawas the anti-West and anti-modern (Dower 2006). To the Chinese now,condemning the Cultural Revolution is throwing off the ugly past inevery conceivable way.

The ‘making of history’, as Certeau gives it as a title of a chapter inThe Writing of History, deals with the present as much as with the past.What is required of the present is the framework to construct the past.The writing and debates about the Cultural Revolution are politicalspeech acts of identification. This chapter aims to demonstrate how theidentification with the dominant values of liberal democracy andmarket capitalism (the present) and the remembering of the CulturalRevolution (the past) are connected.

From the wounded to the mentalité: the re-rehearsal of May Fourth

Shanghen wenxue, the scar literature or literature of the wounded,emerged almost immediately after the Cultural Revolution as a seriesof first-person accounts in the form of short accounts, usually authoredby zhiqing (educated youth) sent to the countryside or state farms inborder regions. Prominent writers include Liu Xinhua, Zhang Xian-liang and Liu Xinwu.1 The so-called scar literature was initiallyencouraged by the Chinese leadership to place blame at the door of theGang of Four for whatever was considered wrong or bad in China atthat time so as to legitimize the destruction of Maoist policies. It wasthe emergence of the scar literature that symbolized the beginning ofthe condemnation of the Cultural Revolution both in and outsideChina. Subsequently another literary genre, known as reportage (Link1983a, 1983b), also helped the progression of denunciation of theCultural Revolution and denegation of the era of Mao.


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When the Chinese elite intelligentsia further reflected, they becamecritical not only of the Cultural Revolution but also of a whole package ofCCP policies and practices which were condemned as ‘feudalistic’(fengjian). Condemnation of the past thus developed from the personal tothe state and from the body to the discourse. The theoretical frameworkthat organized such a condemnation was largely the May Fourth (1919)legacy of Enlightenment which blamed Chinese traditional culturalvalues, that is, the Chinese mentality, for China’s impotence whenassaulted by the Western powers and by Japan, a brilliant student of theWest. The May Fourth Movement discourse was picked up again and,for those members of the neo-Enlightenment Chinese intelligentsia suchas Li Zehou, Jin Guantao, Liu Xiaobo, Bao Zunxin, Wang Yuanhua andGan Yang, the Chinese revolution crystallized in 1949 was a result ofnationalism (jiuwang – to save the country from dying) that derailed theproper course of Enlightenment (qimeng – remove the curtain of igno-rance) of Western liberal values such as individualism, self-autonomyand democracy.

It is ironic that while some of the potent slogans at the beginningof the Cultural Revolution were those that were meant to break downChinese tradition, such as the po si jiu (break away from the fourolds), the Cultural Revolution is narrated by the neo-Enlightenmentintelligentsia as the manifestation and logical consequence of aChinese feudalist tradition that values ‘despotism’, ‘servile obedi-ence’ and ‘blind loyalty to authorities’. It is doubly ironic when oneconsiders the documented evidence that it was Mao who called theChinese youth to rebel against the authorities, who provoked themnot be obedient and not to follow their leaders blindly. ‘Throw theemperor off his horse’ was one of the most inspiring slogans used bythe Cultural Revolution rebels. Indeed, every figure of the CCP hier-archy – including the Cultural Revolution radicals themselves suchas Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and even Mao – was attacked duringthe Cultural Revolution (Lao Tian 2004). At the beginning of theCultural Revolution, when the newly promoted Tao Zhu was accusedof protecting Liu Shaoqi, Tao immediately issued a statement declar-ing that anybody, including himself, could be criticized except Maoand his deputy Lin Biao (Wang Li 2001: 675). For the neo-Enlighten-ment warriors, however, it was the idea that Mao’s authority couldnot be questioned that was the manifestation of feudalism in the formof blind loyalty and servile obedience. Mao somehow had to haveunquestionable authority to call the Rebels to question the authorityof the party chiefs at every level. It is a permanent and universalhuman paradox that one cannot question the authority of somebodyor something without having the authority to do so: the questioningof one authority requires another for legitimacy.

C O N S T R U C T I N G H I S TO RY

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There are, of course, also Western scholars who seek to find explana-tions from Chinese tradition for what has happened during the CulturalRevolution. Barend ter Haar argues that violent struggle was no innova-tion of the Mao era but had important roots in traditional Chineseculture, which has a ‘demonological paradigm and its messianic corre-late’ (Haar 2002: 27) that contribute to cultural expressions of mass polit-ical campaigns of a violent nature. There are similarities between thosethat happened in historical times and those that happened post-1949 ingeneral and during the Cultural Revolution in particular. The CCP mighthave tried to root out the Chinese traditional religious infrastructure, butit still used the basic demonological categories and it filled the categorieswith new contents. Equally, Stefan Landsberger (2002) argues that theunifying symbol of Mao’s messianic leadership is rooted in Chineseculture and popular religion.

Some other influential Western academics, however, argue that itwas the May Fourth radicalism that was to blame for the violence andinhumanity of the communist revolution (Lin 1979, Leys 1988). ForLeys, China was subjected to the tyranny of Marxism-Leninism gonemad. For Lin, it was the totalistic anti-traditionalism of the May FourthMovement that led to subsequent developments in China. In Leys’understanding and interpreting of contemporary China there is an‘academic Great Wall of China’ of 1949 that divides the traditionalChina and contemporary China (Cohen 1988, Fitzgerald 1999). For theneo-Enlightenment intelligentsia, however, the wall never existed andMao was a peasant turned emperor-dictator. All the ideas and practicesin the Mao era, though they might have been in the name of Marxism-Leninism, can be traced back to Chinese tradition of feudalism. Howelse can the intelligentsia reignite the Western Enlightenment fire ifthey want to jettison revolution (gaobie geming) by denouncingMarxism, which in fact is one of the prominent descendants of thatvery Western Enlightenment?

The May Fourth Movement (Schwarcz 1986, Lin 1979) was aboutabandoning Chinese tradition and embracing Western values becauseChinese tradition was considered not only backward and uncivilizedbut also inhumane and even ‘man-eating’. Aspiring members of theChinese elite intelligentsia either physically went to the West (Japanwas already being considered sufficiently Western) to seek the truth, orwere devouring Western ideas from an ever growing canon of impor-tant textual translations. The overwhelming desire was a wholesaleWesternization and a total destruction of the Chinese mentalitè, that is,everything culturally Chinese. Lu Xun declared not only that oneshould never read Chinese books but also that fang kuai zi (the Chinesescript) was a cancer in Chinese culture.

For the Chinese intelligentsia in the 1980s, the Communist victory


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was a peasant revolution in which nationalism hijacked Enlighten-ment. China completed to a full circle after more than half a century:Enlightenment had been interrupted by a revolution and a post-revo-lution make-up lesson was required before China could join the humanrace. Thus there was Li Zehou’s re-Enlightenment thesis and hisembracing of Christian individualism, Liu Xiaobo’s rejection of collec-tive progress and his advocacy of the Nietzschean hero (Woei 2002).Furthermore, such writers all trace the root of the Cultural Revolutionto the faults of Chinese tradition, as their predecessors such as Lu Xunand Hu Shi traced the weakness of China to Chinese tradition.

This neo-Enlightenment teleology either assumes or argues thatChinese backwardness is largely due to the peasantry, and Chinese peas-ants are thus objectified as being detrimental to modernization (Kipnis1995). Those who adopt the neo-Enlightenment position interpretChinese politics in terms of what they call nongmin yishi or ‘peasantconsciousness’ (Feng 1989). Feng argues that without considering thepeasant consciousness, it is impossible adequately to explain not onlywhat happened in China but also the revolutionary histories of the coun-tries of the former Soviet Union and all the socialist countries, the devel-opment of Fascism in France, Japan and Italy, and what currentlyhappens in all Third World countries. According to Feng, China’s close-mindedness, power worship, moralism, benightedness, the Taipinguprising, the Boxer movement, and above all the communist revolutionall have much to do with nongmin yishi (Feng 2003). The CCP bureaucratand modernist writer Li Shenzhi was hailed as the liberal leader becausehe condemned the CCP as remnant of despotic Chinese tradition(www.sinoliberal.com/lishenzhi/lisz2003062101.htm).2

Clearly, the literature of the wounded by the zhiqing started the suku:telling of bitterness (Anagnost, 1997) of the Cultural Revolution. Thenarrative then developed from personal grievances to a theoreticalreflection on the Mao era, on Mao himself, and on the very idea andpractice of the Chinese Communist revolution. The theoretical frame-work disposable at that time was the legacy of the May FourthMovement. As the popular television documentary He shang (TheRiver Elegy) tried to show, not only the Chinese political system butalso the Chinese civilization was backward and actually uncivilized.The way forward to join the civilized world was to leave behind theYellow River (peasant) mentality and the close-mindedness of theGreat Wall and look towards the open blue-ocean civilization (haiyangwenming) of the West.

By the standard of the currently dominant discourse of liberaldemocracy, shangshan xiaxiang (sending the educated youth to themountain and the countryside) was violation of human rights. Thisidentification with the globally dominant value means that it is


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irrelevant that most, if not all, educated youth, at least at the initialstage, volunteered to take part in the movement (Leung 1994). It isalso irrelevant that for all intents and purposes educated youth‘suffered’ only from an urban perspective and to large extent onlyfrom hindsight. From the perspectives of the rural residents, theeducated youth had a good life. They did not have to work as hardas the local farmers and they had state and family subsidies. Theywould frequently go back to visit their parents in the cities (Leung1994), and they had money to spend and wore fashionable clothes.They would bring food in cans and tins that the rural people hadnever seen (Seybolt 1996). They had the privilege of being allowedto violate local rules and customs, and sometimes behavedwaywardly by stealing fruit and vegetables and killing chickensraised by villagers for their own benefit. For most of the ruralpeople, the educated youth were the envy of their life and wererespected (Davies 2002). Finally, those educated youths whosefamily backgrounds were of ‘class enemies’ actually enjoyed aperiod of relief because the rural people respected them all withoutbothering about the class line.

Ever since the 1980s the urban Chinese intelligentsia elite who haddominated the public space have not thought of their experience fromthis perspective. They compare their life with, and identify with, theaffluent West. Their common complaint is that they missed the bestformal education that they deserved even though they witnessed thefact that the majority of their compatriots could not even dream of suchan opportunity. As Sausmikat (2002) argues, the structure of theiraccount is ‘shaped by their current social situation as well as the domi-nant public discourse’. The dominant public discourse in China sincethe late 1980s is no longer that of narrowing the gap between the urbanand rural, between industry and agriculture and between mental andmanual labour, but of narrowing the gap between the West and China.

As Davies (2002) argues in his doctoral thesis on the educatedyouth, the dominant narrative is not about the historical CulturalRevolution, but about the way it exists and persists in contemporaryChina. In other words it is not about what happened (historical).Rather it is about what is happening (anthropological). History refersto both the totality of past events and reporting of these events. Theproblem is, however, that these events are only known throughreporting. ‘They become events because they were reported’ (Davies2002: 8). Reporting, however, is framed in narrative and ‘we perceivethe past in the present through the construction of narrative’ (Davies2002: 9). What is reported and the way it is reported is not only selec-tive but also subjective to discursive context. History then can betalked back and is a meaningful terrain for articulating the present.


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Be American citizens in thinking

Just as our ways of talking depend upon the world, the world dependsour way of talking about it (Shotter 1990: 125). Therefore our way ofspeaking becomes central because ‘We speak in order to create, maintain,reproduce and transform certain modes of social and societal relation-ships’ (1990:121). Remembering is an ‘Accounting practice … within thecontext of how people render what is otherwise a puzzling, senseless orindeterminate activity visible as familiar, sensible, determinate and justi-fied commonplace occurrence’ (1990:123). ‘An account is not a descrip-tion, which by the provision of evidence could be proved true or false,but it works as an aid to perception, literally instructing one both in howto see something as a commonplace event, and, in so seeing it, appreci-ating the opportunities it offers for one’s own further action’ (1990:123).There is no ‘ghost in the machine’, there is no private ‘inner’ subjectiv-ity, radically separated from an ‘outer, public world’, and ‘memory, likeattention and perception, is selective’ (1990:128). When one remembersone’s experience of the Cultural Revolution, there is no such thing as‘retrieving’ in recall. Instead, recall constructs the memory. ‘If any singletheme informs of Foucault’s [1976] seminar, it is not a quest for politicaltheory, but an appreciation of historiography as a political force, ofhistory writing as a political act’ (Stoler 1995: 62).

Those who write memoirs and autobiographies of the Mao era ingeneral, and of the Cultural Revolution in particular, tend to recall theirmemories with bitterness, condemnation and even horror as if whathappened was a nightmare from which they had just woken up. This isbecause they are using the current discourse to identify with certainvalues, doing that to construct the past. In this enterprise of constructingthe past through the discourse of the present, remembering the CulturalRevolution as a nightmare identifies with the West, its values and its wayof life, especially these of the United States. This is not surprising due tothe hegemonic position of the West headed by the United States. Thepolitical, economic and military superiority can easily be translated assuperiority in cultural and life value. These globally dominant values aretherefore taken as universally and transcendentally true.

The case of Li Yunlong, a Guizhou journalist working for the Bi Jieribao (Bi Jie daily), illustrates the point. Under the pen name of Ye lang(night wolf) Li wrote an e-media chat piece in which he called on theChinese to become an American citizen in thinking (zai sixiang shangjiaru Meiguo guoji). Li declared that he could not help but raise his headto pay respect to the United States, a country that has a beautiful envi-ronment, a developed economy, and freedom of speech and religion,and that practises political democracy. The United States is a realMeiguo (Meiguo is the Chinese translation of the United States which


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literally means ‘beautiful country’). ‘I wish to migrate to that countrybut could not,’ he laments. ‘What should I do? I have decided tobecome its citizen in my thoughts’ (Ye lang 2005).

Sinological orientalism

Professor Jiao Guobiao of Beijing University bemoans how unfortu-nate it is that the United States had not, during the Korean War,marched straight to Beijing to take over China. He swears that if hehad the power he would turn China into the 51st State of the Union.When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Jiao posted a poem onthe e-media in which he declared that if he was called he would servein the US army without the slightest hesitation. But he could onlywish to be a US soldier in his next life (Xiao Ling 2005). Not surpris-ingly in 2005 Professor Jiao was invited to visit the United States forsix months by the US National Endowment for Democracy toresearch the subject of ‘The Chinese News Industry: Past and Present’(http://www.zonaeuropa.com/ 20050328_3.htm).3

This identification with Western values confirms the Sinologicalorientalist (Vukovich 2005) view of oriental despotism (Wittfogel 1957).Leon Trotsky called Stalin an ‘Asiatic’ who, like other Asiatic leaders,was cunning, brutal and peasant (Trotsky 1967). Marx’s proposition ofthe ‘Asiatic mode of production’, a convenient way of avoiding thediscussion of evidence that might be messy for the grand history of tele-ological human development, differed very little from the views ofHegel, Montesquieu, Smith and many other thinkers (Anderson 1974) inrelation to China. Oriental despotism reached its logical conclusionwhen Wittfogel, a communist defector turned cold warrior, precedingFeng, applied the concept of despotism to ‘China, Tsarist Russia, Persia,Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Incas, even the Hopi Indians of Arizona’(Cumings 2005). However, the veteran theme of the Oriental other takeson some variations when applied to the Cultural Revolution.

In contemporary Western images of China, the Cultural Revolu-tion is a potent symbol of the ugly face of Chinese society, as theNazi era is a symbol of the ugly face of German society. TheCultural Revolution has been a lucrative tool for the West in itscritique of the Chinese government; it has given the West themoral high ground in this debate

(Brady 2002: 95)

Two whateverism4

Chinese in and outside China who want to identify with the globallydominant values are not only encouraged but constantly promoted by


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Western governments and some academics alike. The cultivated imageof America as the paradise for freedom and as the avenger against thebrutal Chinese political system is so strong that some members of theChinese elite would go as far as to support whatever the US govern-ment says or does, and to oppose whatever the Chinese governmentsays or does. Their speech acts coordinate well with Western politicalagenda that in China they are often referred to as fanshi pai (whatev-erists). This crude adversarialism is nicknamed on the Chinese e-medialiangge fanshi (Two whateverism): whatever China does is wrong andwhatever the United States does is right. The logic is that since theUnited States is the number one liberal and democratic country itcannot do anything wrong, and since the PRC is ruled by a dictatorialCCP it cannot do anything right.

A website contributor lists more than 40 ‘whatevers’, contrastingattitudes towards the United States and China (Sumo3, 2004). Theseinclude: whatever the US does is democratic and whatever China doesis dictatorial; every popular protest against the US government is anexercise of democratic rights, and every Chinese protest against theUnited States is parallel to the Boxer Rebels or Angry Young Men (fenqing); whenever the United States increases military expenditure it isfor peace, and whenever China does so it constitutes a military threat;whenever the United States does anything against China it is to protectAmerican interest, and whenever China does anything that it is not inthe interest of the United States it is xenophobia; whenever US civiliansare attacked it is terrorism, and whenever Chinese citizens are attackedby separatists it is activity for self-determination; whenever the USuses forces abroad it is to overthrow dictatorship and rid the world ofevil, and whenever China defends its own territory it is changing thestatus quo.

After the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999,which killed three Chinese and injured a dozen more, there were angryand ugly demonstrations in the streets of some cities in China. Some ofthe Chinese elite intelligentsia in and outside China responded to thesedemonstrations by making two points which are very telling. The firstpoint is that the Chinese government should apologize and compen-sate the millions of victims of the regime first before they had theaudacity to ask Washington for an apology. The second is that thoseanti-US demonstrations were repeating the behaviour of the BoxerRebels (Cao 1999), irrational and anti-modern.

Some of the Chinese intelligentsia openly declare that they worshipAmerica (An Qi 1998). One well-known Chinese dissident in exiledeclared that he would rather be an animal in a foreign country than aChina person (Zheng 2004). When the invasion of Iraq started, onedissident academic in Hong Kong said that he envied the Iraqis


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because people all over the world protested against the US invasionand against the death of innocent people. Why was there nobodyprotesting against the death of people in China, as a result of accidentsand SARS for instance (Wu 2003)?

Yu Jie, the initiator of the letter ‘A Declaration by Chinese Intellec-tuals Supporting the US Government’s Destruction of Saddam’sDictatorial Regime’, says that Mao is the predecessor of Saddam, thathuman rights takes priority over national sovereignty and that theUnited States behaved multilaterally because US values were universalvalues of democracy and human rights (Yu Jie 2003b). President Busharranged a special occasion to meet Yu Jie and a couple of otherChinese Christian converts in the White House in 2006 (Buckley 2006),a privilege that is usually given to personalities like His Holiness theDalai Lama.

Liu Xiaobo, another prominent Chinese intellectual, who oncedeclared that China could only be saved by being colonized for two orthree hundred years (Chengdan 2003), argued that even if the US inva-sion were motivated by self-interest the war was good for humanity, aswere all other wars that the United States participated in with the soleexception of the Vietnam War (Liu 2003). A BBC correspondent,commenting on the e-media debate by the Chinese on the Iraqi war,admits that these Chinese love America and are more pro-Bush thanthe Americans themselves (Wei 2003).5

The politics of joining the civilized world

The desire to identify with the currently dominant values and world-view is not only strong among the intelligentsia, but can also be seenimplicitly within official Chinese government policy and personalstatements. The television programme He shang, which denigratesChinese tradition, was supported by the then CCP General SecretaryZhao Ziyang. In a recent book published in Hong Kong that detailsZhao’s ideas as conveyed in his conversations during the years ofhouse arrest after his downfall during the Tian’anmen crackdown in1989, Zhao argued that China should follow the United States becausethe interest of the United States corresponded to the interest ofhumanity (Zhao 2007). Another veteran CCP leader, Ren Zhongyi,argues that the democratic model of san quan fen li (the separation ofthe three constitutional powers: the executive, the judiciary andlegislative) is an achievement of human civilization that has to beembraced (Zhang Deqin 2006).

The Chinese official line is most clearly evident in its pursuit ofeconomic development by adopting the neoliberal rationalism. Forexample, though a developing country, China under the leadership of


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Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji agreed to enter the WTO on condition thatits market should be more open to the West than the mature capitalisteconomy of Japan. The former deputy foreign trade minister and chiefnegotiator of China’s entry into the WTO, Long Yingtu, declared thatthe day when the world’s major car manufacturers all settled theirproduction in China would be the day China’s motor industry won(http://www.fhy.net 2006). The development of special economiczones and the huge state investment in cities like Shanghai and Beijingare considered by some as designed to Europeanize China’s southcoast cities at the expense of what is referred to as ‘Africanization’ ofthe rural heartland (Zhang Peiyuan 2006).

Media agenda and identification with the West

That the Chinese political and intellectual elite are willing to identifywith what they perceive to be advanced Western values can also beseen by how very often the Western, especially the US, media set theagenda of what is news and what is important for the Chinese.

Twenty-four hours, day and night, for 20 days a billion Chineseviewers sat glued to their television sets as soldiers fought inIraq. They watched live coverage of government leaders’speeches one after another, government press conferences oneafter another, official slogans and national flags one afteranother. They were watching government and military-approved journalists travelling, eating, sleeping, chatting andlaughing with soldiers. These journalists were broadcasting livewith ‘their’ troops. You might have thought it was just theclassic propaganda of the communists and the communist-controlled media. In actuality, the Chinese were watching CNNand Rupert Murdoch’s channels. From the first day of the war,the Chinese government handed over the country’s five mostpopular TV channels to CNN and Murdoch. All the images andmessages the Chinese audience got from their TV sets werefiltered by CNN and Murdoch’s people.

(Li Xiguang 2005).

The Chinese official media has done an excellent job in promotingpositive images of the United States. For instance according to onestudy (Sarabia-Panol 2006), the tone of coverage of the 9/11 attack onthe United States by the Chinese daily newspaper the China Daily was25 per cent positively pro-America, 75 per cent neutral and 0 per centnegative whereas the percentages were 9 per cent positive, 41 per centneutral and 50 per cent negative in the India press and 19.6 per cent


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positive, 5.6 per cent neutral and 14.8 per cent negative in the Japanesepress. More revealingly, 62.5 per cent of the sources of this completelack of criticism of the United States were from Chinese national offi-cials. According to another study, university students in China get theirimage and impression of how good the West and the United States arefrom the official Chinese media. ‘The Chinese media talk about howgood the United States is every day and sometimes too good to betrue’, the website commented.

When the Chinese central bureaucrats are impelled to be critical ofthe United States, the effect of the criticism is usually minimal. Inrecent years the Chinese government would respond to US criticism ofits human rights record by issuing condemnations and even a WhitePaper on human rights abuses in America. My impression is that veryfew in China take the Chinese position seriously. Having been immu-nized by the BBC, VOA and Free Asia, with their constant publicityand promotion of the media agenda to expose the Chinese governmentas one of the worst political regimes on earth, why would the educatedelite believe the conventional Chinese media whose function is openlydeclared to be propaganda? When Beijing temporarily halted publica-tion of Zero magazine for its publication of an essay by Professor YuanWeishi ,who argued that the impotent and corrupt political system andbackward Chinese cultural values were ultimately responsible forChina’s humiliation at the hands of Western powers during theeighteen and nineteenth centuries, the decision aroused widespreadderision and contempt.

Memoirs, values and identification

One of the earliest memoirs in English that had a huge impact on theWestern is that by Nien Cheng (1987). Before the Cultural Revolution,Nien lived with her daughter in a big house in the middle of suppos-edly-communist Shanghai. They had three servants plus a part-timegardener to serve them. Nien’s husband was the director of theShanghai branch of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the NationalistGovernment and later became the general manager of the ShanghaiOffice of Shell International Petrol Company. After her husband diedNien became an assistant to a British Shell manager with the title ofadvisor. But the Cultural Revolution radicalism meant that all the priv-ilege disappeared overnight. Worse still, Nien Cheng tragically lost heronly daughter. For Nien identification with Western values was almostautomatic and natural, because she was part of the West before shebecame the ‘enemy’ of the revolution.

The interesting cases, and the ones that prove the thesis of thischapter, are those of the children of the revolution. Yang Xiaokai was


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once a teenage rebel and wrote one of the most radical revolutionarypamphlets, Whither China, at the age of 17, in his then name YangXiguang. Yang then went to the United States and did his PhD ineconomics at Princeton. He was later converted to Christianity and hada successful career as an economics professor at an Australian univer-sity. Before his unfortunate death in 2005 Yang tirelessly advocatedneoliberal economic policies for China.

The most successful, that is the most popular and influential,memoir is surely that by expatriate Chinese Jung Chang. Chang natu-rally assumes that students of peasant background are ‘semi-literate’and had ‘little aptitude’, while she was clever and deserved the best,including a generous Chinese government scholarship to study inBritain. Chang claims that she was the victim of a brutal regime but, Infact, as well as being a Red Guard, Jung Chang was the privilegeddaughter of China’s Communist elite. It is a peculiarity of the receptionof Wild Swans that it was told and read as a story of great personalsuffering, when its author grew up with a wet-nurse, nanny, maid,gardener and chauffeur provided by the party, protected in a walledcompound, educated in a special school for officials’ children. As aGrade 10 official, her father was among the 20,000 most senior peoplein a country of 1.25 billion, and it was in this period that children of‘high officials’ became almost a class of their own. Still, the enthusiasticWestern audience of Wild Swans found something to identify in JungChang’s perennial fear of being reduced to the level of the rest of thepopulation, shuddering with her at the prospect that ‘Mao intendedme to live the rest of my life as a peasant’ (Heartfield 2005).

It was during the supposedly most difficult times of her family thatChang managed to leave the countryside a few weeks after she wassent down, become a barefoot doctor, an electrician and then a univer-sity student, and finally receive a generous scholarship to study in theUK, the kind of career moves that were dreams for millions of youngChinese, all accomplished during the Cultural Revolution years beforeher father was officially rehabilitated.

For anyone to consider that such a personal account of contempo-rary China is less political is an illusion. There is no personal accountoutside the political context, and ‘the personal can be political in a veryliteral sense’ (Fitzgerald, 1999: 6). This is worth pointing out becausefew actually realize that ‘all histories of China are partly autobiograph-ical’ (Fitzgerald 1999: 8). They are ‘autobiographical’ not only in thesense that writers such as Jung Chang and Nien Cheng write abouttheir lives from which histories emerge, but also in the sense that theirmemoirs are artefacts which are the results of cultural exchangebetween China and the West in such a way that foreign readers andwriters participate in making Chinese history.


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It is certainly not an accidental attribute that Jung Chang felt moreat home in the West (Chang 1991) and that Chai Ling and Li Lu, twowell-known Tian’anmen student protest leaders, are now respectivelya company executive and a stockbroker.6 Those who became Christiansalso include one of the writers of the He shang script, Yuan Zhiming,who apparently has become a full-time preacher, and the active e-media dissident Ren Bumei. For these Chinese expatriates theiridentification with Western political and cultural values goes hand inhand with their criticism of China’s past or present.

Many in the West are concerned that the CCP is too rigorous inoppressing freedom in China and that China is still an enclosed society.In other words, they are worried that China does not identify with theWest enough and believe that is why China cannot be modern (Hutton2007). In fact they need not worry. It is not just the expatriate Chinesein the West who want to identify with the West in their constructing ofcontemporary Chinese history. The mainstream Chinese intellectualsand professionals inside China have been trying to fulfil the samehistorical task. Some of these engineers of intellectual discourse, suchas the whateverists examined above, may be considered to be on thefringe of Chinese bureaucratic establishment, but there are also manyinfluential public figures who may be considered Americans inthoughts. Below are just a number of examples.

The issue of whether the collapse of communism in Russia initiatedby Gorbachev and pushed through by Yeltsin was a success or failureis controversial in China because either way it has implications forinterpreting China’s reform and for its future direction. It is in thiscontext that Ma Licheng and Lin Zhijun (1998) argued in their influen-tial book Jiaofeng (Frontal Engagement) that whoever argues againstthe Russian reform is against the reform agenda in China.

Along similar line, Li Shenzhi, who served as Vice-President of theChinese Academy of Social Sciences and the first President of theChinese Association of American Studies, and who is considered thegodfather of liberalism by many in China, asserted that Lenin wasresponsible for discontinuing Russia’s process of modernization(Yiming 2003), that Mao was a bandit, warlord and tyrant and thatChina had to change, either through peaceful evolution or violentrevolution. Li also declared that if China wanted to modernize it hadto follow the United States and had to be prepared to be the grandsonof the United States (Zhang Deqin 2006). In case any reader fails toappreciate what Li meant, it is worth pointing out that in the Chinesecultural context, to be someone grandson is to submit to an authorityfor wisdom and control.

Zhang Xianliang, a prominent novelist, argues that market capi-talism is the best and 10,000 years (not just three cheers) to private


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ownership. Yu Guangyuan, an eminent political economist, argues thatChina needs market economy and that if there is a dispute on this it isnot a dispute between socialism and capitalism but a dispute betweenthe advanced and the backward (Zhang Hengzhi 2006). Li Yining,another influential economist, argues not only that to aim an equal endresult for everyone in human society is wrong, but also that to createan equal starting point for every one is not possible. Instead, Chinashould make use of the value of division of labour in a family: the elderbrother goes to college while the second brother works to support him.Once you have this rationality then there is no sense of unfairness(Zhang Deqin 2006). Mao Yushi and Xu Liangying argue thatmodernization is Americanization, and globalization has to be on thebasis of Western civilization (Yiming 2003).

The intellectual–business–political complex in contemporaryChina

Clearly, identification with liberal democracy and market capitalistvalues is not just about an intellectual debate. Some of these intellec-tual elite such as Li Yining have vast business and commercialinterests. Others such as Yu Guangyuan are think tank heavyweightswho give lectures to high-ranking party officials and draft policypapers. Moreover, descendants of most of the top CCP officials fromDeng Xiaoping to Zhao Ziyang, and from Zhu Rongji to Jiang Zemin,have US connections (more on these connections in later chapters).

It is therefore not surprising that publication outlets that are criticalof the Chinese government from the point of view of the left such as中流 (Mainstay) and 真理的追求 (Pursuit of Truth) were banned. Awebsite 中国工人网 (Chinese workers net) set up in 2005 thatpublished the views and opinions of workers was banned in early2006; the excuse for shutting down this workers’ net set up by somepoor workers was that they failed to pay the registration fee of 10million RMB!7

Conclusion: memories, identity, knowledge and truth

By arguing that memoirs and suku (telling of bitterness) of the CulturalRevolution are constructing history I do not intend to argue that therewas no bitterness to tell. I only want to show how the telling isconstructed. My thesis that the narrative of the Cultural Revolution hasbeen closely connected with a speech act of political identity withliberal democracy and market capitalist values may be criticized on thebasis that it is disproved by the fact that the majority of the Chinesebureaucrats of the CCP, which is anti-Western and dictatorial (the very


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antithesis of Western values of democracy and freedom, they wouldargue), also denounce the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping, forinstance, confessed that it is difficult to say anything good about theCultural Revolution because he suffered too much (Zhai 2006). I wouldargue that these Chinese officials endorse the attack on the CulturalRevolution not just because they were personally attacked during theperiod, but because they actually identify with a set of values that weredifferent from those of the Cultural Revolution.

It is true that the CCP power holders of Deng’s generation were alsoproponents and practitioners of the theory of class struggle. They cameto denounce the Cultural Revolution only after they became thevictims of that theory. However, that does not mean they are anti-Western. They are certainly not against market capitalism. DengXiaoping and many like him were not really Marxists but basicallyrevolutionary nationalists who wanted to see China standing on equalterms with the great global powers. They were primarily nationalistsand they participated in the Communist revolution because that wasthe only viable route they could find to Chinese nationalism. The twothemes of nationalism and class struggle worked together well before1949 (Dong 2006). But after 1949, the two themes could not fit togetherso well. For Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping class struggle was more ameans to an end of achieving national unity and dignity. Once thatgoal had been accomplished the class struggle theme of the Marxistparadigm became irrelevant and the class struggle of the Maoist para-digm was seen as disastrously erroneous. The theme of national unitymeant that political control had to remain tight, or democratic reformwould lead to national disintegration. The theme of national dignitymeant that China’s economy needed to catch up with that of the West.Therefore, to embrace market capitalism was a natural course of actionfor them. What happened after the death of Mao proved this beyonddispute.

To conclude this chapter let us reiterate that, as Ricoeur majesticallyargues, there are not only repressed memories (more discussion on thisin a later chapter), but also manipulated memories and forced memo-ries. Both memory and forgetfulness are subject to an intensemanipulation by power. The power that manipulates memories can bethat which suppresses certain kind of memories while promotingcertain others. It is certainly in the interest of those in power within theCCP to promote the telling of bitterness and to ban memories thatshow the positive side of the Cultural Revolution.

What happened in 1985 in Xianyang of Shaanxi province is a tellingexample of this interest. A poster was put up on a wall on NorthwestCotton Factory No 1 in a very busy district. The title of the poster isWenhua da geming hao (The Cultural Revolution was Good). In the


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poster the authors listed merits of the Cultural Revolution such as thebuilding of the Nanjing Bridge, the creation of hybrid rice crops andthe rise of people’s consciousness. The poster alarmed not only the city,provincial authorities but also the central CCP. Beijing sent an inves-tigative team to find out what the ‘active reactionaries’ were up to. Theperson found guilty was a young worker at a shoe factory. He wassentenced to ten years’ jail and died in jail soon after arrest without anyapparent cause (Wu Zhenrong and Deng Wenbi 2004).

Memories can also be manipulated by recourse to financial and intel-lectual assistance and rewards. This is especially so when memories areconstructed in the West to suit Sinological orientalism.

For the liberals of the West’s pensée unique, Maoism, like all formsof socialism, is an aberration in itself. This a priori approach iscompletely ideological, reactionary, ahistorical and without scien-tific foundation, and it is of course taken up by the Chinese right.The right relies on invectives against the ‘crimes of the CulturalRevolution’ to refrain from analysing the realities of the Maoistphase.

(Amin 2005: 132).

Finally the power that manipulates memories can be a form of knowl-edge that has truth and moral claims. This is the most effective powerof all. It can abuse memories because it orientates memories to certainnarrative and ‘it is through the narrative function that memory isincorporated in the making of identity’ (Ricoeur 2000:103). The kind ofnarrative is made of memories and forgetfulness that consist of aconfiguration of protagonists with identities that define action. Thiskind of knowledge, by manipulating memories, in turn legitimizesorders of power. To take a Foucauldian line, the power that is reallypersuasive is the one that is based on knowledge, knowing of historyand the world. The prevalent knowledge held to be true globally isliberal democracy and market capitalism. The narrative of the CulturalRevolution that is true has to be premised on this knowledge.


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3 Constructing history:memoirs, autobiographiesand biographies in Chinese

Introduction: scope and rationale

Many memoirs, autobiographies and biographies have been written byauthors who have a PRC national background. One category that hasdominated the field comprises those written in Western languages,mainly in English, and published in the West; another has includedthose written in Chinese and published in mainland China, HongKong or Taiwan. While memoirs, autobiographies and biographiespublished elsewhere appear to be more ‘objectively’ critical of Maothan those published in mainland China, both English and Chineselanguage publications, ever since the 1980s, have tended to join thechorus of total condemnation of the Cultural Revolution whenever thesubject is mentioned. These two categories of writings appear to haveincreasing importance in formulating specific political discourses andhistorical narratives and in influencing public perception and opinionof Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

Since the late 1990s, however, voices that challenge the dominantofficial or semi-official political discourse and historical narrativeshave also started to appear. Because no challenge to the mainstreamdiscourse of total condemnation is officially allowed in mainlandChina, particularly in the conventional media, dissenting voices aremostly heard only from unofficial sources such as private conversa-tions as well as the increasingly flourishing but technologicallydifficult to control e-media. This third category of ‘unofficial’ literatureconsists of piecemeal memories and personal testimonials as well asessays or even blogs about Mao and the Cultural Revolution. An eval-uation and comparison of these three categories of literature is not onlyuseful but also necessary.

Very little has done in this respect. Joshua A. Fogel (1997) is one ofthe few who have written about memoirs by Chinese writers. Fogel’swork, however, is only a short study of what has been written aboutthe Chinese communist ‘philosopher’ Ai Siqi. Zarrow (1999) and Kong(1999) have made some very thoughtful and insightful comments, butonly on memoirs and biographies in English. Teiwes (1997) alsotouches on the subject but only talks about the benefits and pitfalls ofinterviewing CCP party historians and historical participants.

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In this chapter I will not talk about the first and third categories, thatis, memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in English, and e-mediachallenges to the mainstream historical narratives; these are discussedelsewhere in this study. Instead I will focus on the second category, thatis, memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in Chinese.

Memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in Chinese: a literature survey

Since the late 1980s memoirs, biographies or autobiographies of somesort or another have become a publication phenomenon in China.Volumes and volumes turn out every year and almost every knownpublic figure of the older generations, be it in the field of military, poli-tics, or literature and art, has been written about.1 After going throughmore than a couple of hundred of them I find that many writers of thisgroup are cautious and tend to write impersonally without namingnames when sensitive personalities are involved. Being sanctioned andencouraged by the Chinese authorities, they tend to fervidly denouncethe fallen Gang of Four and Lin Biao while praising other rehabilitatedCCP leaders. Their narratives are very often shrouded in the standardofficial rhetoric, full of statements and propositions but short ofsupporting evidence. When referring to sensitive political events orfigures they usually toe the official line.

Two of the most influential biography writers are Quan Yanchi andYe Yonglie.2 Quan’s biography of Mao, based on interviews with Mao’sbodyguard of 15 years, Li Yinqiao, was a runaway success, so much sothat some Hong Kong publishers published a couple of his later books(Quan 1991, 1992). Ye Yonglie (1988, 1990, 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1993a,1993b, 1993c, 1993d, 1993e, 1994a, 1994b, 1995 and 2002), a professionalwriter from Shanghai, has published biographies of Mao Zedong,Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, Zhang Chunqiao, WangHongwen, Yao Wenyuan and many other well-known figures such asMa Sicong and Fu Lei. Ye has managed to tread very cautiouslybetween what is allowed by the Chinese authorities and what canattract a readership. Because he never steps out of the official line polit-ically, he was also allowed to interview and write about sensitivepersonalities such as Wang Li and Guan Feng, the famous radicalleaders during the Cultural Revolution. Sometimes, Ye would simplyadmit that there are things that cannot be revealed.

Biographical series

Apart from individual efforts there are a number of coordinated effortsin writing about a group of personalities as series. These includeDangdai Zhongguo renwu zhuanji (Biographies of Contemporary


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Chinese Personalities), under the editorship of Deng Liqun, Ma Hongand Wu Heng (1991), the biographies of the ten marshals edited by LiYong (1993), and Anecdotes of and Meaningful Remarks by Well-KnownCultural Figures: A Series (Yu Qing, 1994). Another series started since1987 is the memoirs of the generals of the PLA, organized andpublished by the official army publisher in Beijing. These party andarmy officials usually have a special writing team with special fundingfrom the government. When Peng Zhen wrote his memoirs he had ateam of 40 to work for him (Xing Xiaoqun 2006). According to He Fang(2005), who has researched the memoirs of CCP personalities for histwo-volume history of the CCP, very few memoirs can stand up todocumentary examination, and many of those who write do so notonly to glorify themselves but also to settle scores.

The ‘Grand Historian’ Sima Qian was supposed to have set up aparadigm for Chinese historiography which depicts personalityvividly and provides realistic biographical accounts. However,modern Chinese historiography is full of examples of depictingpersonalities as caricatures, like Peking opera characters. Even YanJiaqi (Gao and Yan 1988), who considers himself a serious politicalscientist, now in exile, could not avoid this tendency in his portrayal,for instance, of Jiang Qing.3

Memoirs by veteran party leaders

Not surprisingly, most of the memoirs and biographies include some-thing about the Cultural Revolution. However, while writers like Yeand Quan concentrate on personal lives to avoid political topics, socialthemes or taboo areas of the Cultural Revolution, some sensitivepersonalities themselves may avoid the subject of the Cultural Revolu-tion altogether when writing memoirs. Thus, Bo Yibo (1989, 1991 and1993), Hu Qiaomu (1994), Shi Zhe (1991) and Li Weihan (1986) all stopshort of writing about the Cultural Revolution. Hu Qiaomu, who wasoften referred to as ‘the pen of the Party’, confessed that events beyondthe 1950s were ‘too complex’ to write about.4 Bo Yibo, on the otherhand, only promised follow-up volumes. Wu Lengxi (1995), the chiefeditor of the People’s Daily from 1957 to 1966, on the other hand, onlytalks in general terms in three pages about his dismissal during theCultural Revolution and the conspiracy by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing.Deng Xiaoping’s daughter Deng Maomao, in her two volumes remem-bering her father that were published with a great fanfare in the West,does indeed devote the second volume to the Cultural Revolutionyears (Deng 2000). However, a lot about the Cultural Revolution wasbrushed aside, and in these memoirs she hardly says anything abouther father’s role in casting hundred of thousands innocent Chinese into


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the enemy class of rightists or about his role in the disastrous GreatLeap Forward, both events that helped shaped the way the CulturalRevolution developed (Xu Zidong 2006).

Autobiographical ‘fiction’

There is a group of writers who write in Chinese and publish in China,apparently without too much constraint. Examples of this group are LaoGui (1987), Zhou Changmin (1993), and Liang Xiaosheng (1988).5 Thereare a number of reasons for the publication of these works withoutapparent censorship. First, the books fall in line with the official policyof condemning the Cultural Revolution. Second, they were published inthe form of novels, which, according to the authorities, do not present arecord of history. Third, they were published by minor publishers inremote provinces and thus initially escaped the central authorities’control. Fourth, they do not name real personalities. Finally, in general,these books are about ordinary people’s ordinary lives and thereforesensitive and high-ranking CCP officials are not involved.

These so-called fictional books are actually autobiographical. ZhouChangmin’s address is printed in his book, and thus I was able tocontact him. He told me that every story in the book was a retelling oftrue events and only the names of the characters were not real. XuZidong (2006) has done a content analysis of about 50 novels of thiskind and finds that they can be summarized into four categories: 1)victim stories, that is tales of good people being victimized by badpeople; 2) tales with a moral, showing how the writers overcame thebad events in their lives; 3) stories of absurdity (as seen from today’spoint of view); and 4) stories of misunderstanding and mistakes. ZhouChangmin’s memoirs have all these elements.

Family memories

Many others, like Deng Maomao, have written about relatives who wereprominent CCP personalities. These include Zhu Min (1996), Dong Bianet al. (1992), Dian Dian (1987), Zhang Hanzhi (1994a and 1994b), Liu Siqiand Wang Hebing (1993), Wang Guangmei and Liu Yuan (2000), WangGuangying and Liu Pingping et al. (1992).6 A brief examination of thesememoirs shows that most writers and their parents were portrayed asthe victims of the Cultural Revolution radicalism but were restored topositions of power and glory or vindicated later.7

Understandably, memoirs by the victims or relatives of victims of theCultural Revolution radicalism often tell stories of brutality and experi-ences of suffering. Generally, they do not blame Mao directly and person-ally, but only indirectly by pointing their fingers at the Gang of Four and


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Lin Biao. Recently, however, Liu Yuan (Cai Yongmei 2000) and Dian Dian(Dan Shilian 2000) named names and held Mao responsible for theirfathers’ suffering. Liu Yuan and Wang Guangmei (2000), in a very subtleway of condemning Mao, argue that whatever was successful in thePeople’s Republic of China was the result of joint efforts of Mao and Liuand whatever went wrong was when Mao and Liu Shaoqi went theirseparate ways.

In her memoirs, Zhang Hanzhi, however, could not blame anyoneexplicitly for the downfall of her husband Qiao Guanhua, because Qiaowas supposed to be a follower of the Gang of Four.8 Zhang’s briefaccount of the events that led to her husband’s demise is so full of innu-endo and insinuation that a reader who does not know the intricacies ofthe inner party struggle would not have a clue as to what she is talkingabout. Several times, she points the finger of accusation at Wang Hairongand Tang Wensheng, two women who had high profiles during the lateryears of the Cultural Revolution. The two, working in the Ministry ofForeign Affairs and as Mao’s interpreters, were among the few who wereable to have access to him in the last couple of years of his life. Zhangdoes not name the two women but refers to them as tongtian renwu(personalities who had access to the Mandate of Heaven).

Not allowed to remember

It is important to point out that those who fell after the downfall of LinBiao and the arrest of the Gang of Four are not permitted to write memoirsor autobiographies. Or if they are allowed to write, which occurs rarely,they have to conceal a lot, as Zhang Hanzhi does. Those people, who maybe called post-Cultural Revolution victims, may indeed have somethingquite different to say.9 They are allowed neither to write nor to give inter-views, or if they are it is under strict guidelines or constraint. Thoughactive participants of the Cultural Revolution, like Zhang Chengxian(2002), Guo Yingqiu with Wang Junyi (2002), Nie Yuanzi (2005b), SheRuhui (2004) and Wang Li (2001) wrote memoirs, theirs are explicitly‘self-censored’. Nie Yuanzi , Kuai Dafu and Han Aijing, three of the mostprominent Cultural Revolution student radicals, all face pressure of manykinds not to say anything that is ‘sensitive’ (Ding Dong 2006).

The personalities in this category, that is, those who are not allowedto talk freely but may have something to say that is very different fromthe now accepted truth, are many. Here I will just list some of those whorose during the Cultural Revolution and fell immediately afterwards,excluding the Gang of Four, Lin Biao and his lieutenants. Apart from thewell-known personalities such as Hua Guofeng, Wang Dongxing, Chen Xilian, Mao Yuanxin (Mao’s nephew), Li Na and Li Min (Mao’sdaughters) and Chen Yonggui, there are many less well-known ones


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who might have a lot to say about the Cultural Revolution.10 Theseinclude Sun Jian (once a vice-premier), Sun Yuguo (once DeputyCommander of the Shenyang Military Region), Guo Fenglian (a femaleleader from Dazhai, a commune village that was promoted as a modelby Mao), Zhuang Zedong (three times consecutively World Table TennisChampion and once head of China’s Ministry of Sports), Wu Guixian (afemale textile worker promoted to the vice-premiership), Lü Yulan afemale peasant who was once Party Secretary of Henan province), WeiFengying (a female worker promoted to be a member of CCP CentralCommittee), Xing Yanzi (a female educated youth who was once PartySecretary of Tianjin), Li Suwen (a saleswoman promoted to be theDeputy Chairman of the National People’s Congress (NPC)), Gu Atao (apeasant woman promoted to be a member of CCP Central Committee),Zhang Tiesheng (an educated youth promoted to be a member of theStanding Committee of the NPC), Mao Diqiu (a peasant in ChairmanMao’s home town promoted to be a member of the Standing Committeeof the NPC), Wang Xiuzhen (a female textile worker promoted to beParty Secretary of Shanghai), Chen Ada (a worker and once a memberof the Standing Committee of the NPC), Yu Huiyong (a musical teacherwho was Minister of Culture before his arrest), Hao Liang (Peking operaactor who was Vice-Minister of Culture), Liu Qingtang (a ballet dancerpromoted be a Vice-Minister of Culture), Tong Xiangling (Peking operaactor and a deputy to the NPC), Li Qinglin (a school teacher who in 1972wrote to Mao complaining about his son’s difficulties as a result ofShangshan xiaxiang and subsequently became a member of the StandingCommittee of the NPC).11

It is worth pointing out that the people mentioned above were mostlypromoted to top positions during the Cultural Revolution from verylow social status and many of them were women. This is a clear indica-tion of the Cultural Revolution’s radical affirmative policy of promotingwomen’s status and of an attempt to break down the established CCPbureaucratic hierarchy. These people were swept out of the CCP official-dom as soon as Deng Xiaoping and his followers came back to powerand have been silenced since. Recently, there has been some relaxationof control, and memoirs of such personalities appeared in Hong Kong asin the case of Chen Boda (Chen Xiaonong 2006) and Nie Yuanzi (2005b).All the same, the trace of strong censorship or self-censorship is obviousin these accounts.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

In any case there is no reason to believe that all those who are allowedto talk are telling us ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but thetruth’, even if they actually want to. Yu Erxin (2006b) provides a good


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example to illustrate the point. In the memoirs General Mo Wenhuawrote in 1961, he stated that Deng Xiaoping, then Political Commissarof the Seventh Army, left the army in the middle of a fierce battle andwent to Shanghai via Vietnam, ostensibly to report the situation to theCCP leadership. Soon after the publication of his memoirs Mo wasdismissed from his army post, for no apparent reason. Then in August1966, when Deng was stripped of his official positions because he wasaccused of being the number two capitalist roader, Mo was informedthat the 1961 disciplinary action against him had been wrong. In hisrevised memoirs, which appeared in the 1990s, however, Mo saysnothing of his assertion that Deng ran away in the middle of a battle.And he blames Lin Biao for his own dismissal in 1961.

Another example of how the Chinese authorities work to make surepublications follow what is allowed officially is the inclusion or exclu-sion in selected volumes of important CCP leaders’ speeches. Duringthe 1980s, speeches of Liu Shaoqi were collected into volumes forpublication.12 None of Liu’s speeches made between June 1958 and thesummer of 1960, a gap of two years, were included in this officialpublication compiled by the CCP Central Office of DocumentaryResearch (Lao Tian 2006b). The reason why those speeches are notcollected seems to be that some of Liu’s speeches during this periodwere clearly advocating reckless policies and practices of the GreatLeap Forward. The post-Mao official line is that the Great LeapForward famine was all Mao’s fault.

Some common themes on Mao and the Cultural Revolution

Most writers of these memoirs, autobiographies and biographies inChinese assume or argue that the Cultural Revolution was a ten-yeardisaster and that China’s economy was on the brink of collapse by 1976.On the other hand, few writers writing within China openly denounceMao completely. Mao was blamed for being the initiator of the CulturalRevolution, but many accusations were made against ‘the evil people’,such as the Gang of Four, Lin Biao and Kang Sheng, who had usurpedpower and abused their positions to persecute the loyal, upright, honestand intelligent people. Most of these writers in China do not dwell onthe subject of Mao’s intention to launch the Cultural Revolution. Amongthose who do, few are inclined to argue that Mao was ideologically moti-vated, even though the ideological interpretation was officiallypresented by the CCP 1981 Resolution.13

Mao the person and absence of ideas

These writers tend to accept that Mao was a supreme military strate-gist, a brilliant peasant leader, an unbeatable politician, the only person


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who could lead the CCP to final victory, the father of national unityand founder of the PRC. Many writers indicate that Mao was not inter-ested in reading original works by Marx and Engels, that he alwayswanted to read classic Chinese books and that his huge bed wassurrounded with xianzhuang shu (thread-bound traditional Chinesebooks). Meng Jingyun, one of the two women who stayed with Mao inhis later years, witnessed that the classic Zizhi tongjian (ComprehensiveRecord as a Mirror for Rulers) was with Mao all the time and he readit again and again (Guo 1990).

As for Mao’s ideas and policies after 1957, few writers bother tocontemplate them. They are assumed either to be excuses for powerstruggle or as belonging to a romantic or poetic irrational utopia thatdoes not deserve serious consideration. Every positive contributionMao made in his life had occurred before 1957. After 1957 Mao didnothing right and contributed nothing positive to China and theChinese people. The emperor would sacrifice the well-being of theChinese people for his personal power or to satisfy his personal whimssuch as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This isthe late-Mao thesis that I will come back later. This type of narrative ofPRC history presents1962 to 1965 as the ‘golden period’, the years afterthe disastrous Great Leap Forward and before the calamitous CulturalRevolution, the period when Liu and Deng were fully in charge of thedaily business of governing China. This is in sharp contrast to Mao’sown assessment (1967a) that work was not done properly between1961 and 1965 because a proper form by which the dark side of Chinacould be exposed ‘comprehensively and from the bottom up’ had notbeen found. For Mao the proper form was the Cultural Revolution.

According to the post-Mao narratives of contemporary Chinesehistory, just about every time loyal officials such as Liu Shaoqi, ZhouEnlai, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping, had rescued the Chineseeconomy from the brink of a disaster, Mao the emperor would bringout his personal pet – ’class struggle’ – to wreck the economy. Thus, theSocialist Education Movement, the Cultural Revolution, the Move-ment to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius in 1974, the Movement ofAnti-Rightist Reverse of Verdict in 1975 and the Movement to CriticizeDeng Xiaoping in 1976 were either wrongly initiated by Mao himselfor misled by the Gang of Four, for no reason other than manipulationof power struggle, all of which damaged the development of theChinese economy.

The Movement to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius is accused ofbeing a scheme to victimize Zhou Enlai by innuendo and insinuation.In the late 1980s, Chinese writers on this subject either assumed orargued that it was Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao who distortedMao’s edict so as to usurp power from Zhou. However, since the 1990sthe standard line has been that it was Mao who wanted to criticize


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Zhou Enlai. For the Chinese writers inside China, a rational explana-tion of why Mao wanted to turn against his seemingly most loyallieutenant is simply not an issue, because to seek an answer wouldlead to questioning the very discourse of personal power struggle atthe emperor’s court.

Apart from personal intrigues and court conspiracies, Mao’s sexuallife is also of great interest. Wang Nianyi, one of the foremost Chinesehistorians on the Cultural Revolution, though not putting much in writ-ing, is very serious about the sex story.14 It is not just that Chinese read-ers, like those in the West, like to know about the personal lives of thefamous. For the Chinese, to have many women at the court for sexualpleasure is one of the primary indicators of being an emperor. In tradi-tional China, an emperor could have as many concubines as he chose.How many women Mao possessed for sexual pleasure is something theChinese talk about a lot privately.15

With extensive experience of interviewing Chinese party historiansand political participants, Teiwes thinks that Chinese ‘scholars of partyhistory are thoroughly empiricist in the best traditions of Chinesehistoriography’ but notes that unless one is a member of the innercircle even a high-ranking participant can be vulnerable prey to ‘thenotoriously unreliable hearsay of “small lane news”’(Teiwes 1997: 341).As Fogel’s case study of Ai Siqi shows, if a personality is considered apositive figure by the current Chinese authorities, memoirs, biogra-phies and autobiographies can be valuable; they may offer morepersonal details and the character can be three-dimensional (Fogel1997). Even in these cases, however, much of the literature is organizedto settle the old score, to enhance and advocate certain positions and todiscredit other positions or personalities.

Despite the fact that those writers of memoirs, autobiographies andbiographies come from diversified backgrounds, have had differentexperiences in their lives and write with a variety of motives, theuniformity in their approach and technique is striking. This uniformitycannot be explained away by only referring to official censorship inChina. There must be something deeper and more fundamental,perhaps some traditional legacy of historiography.

Personal power struggles at Mao’s court

The theme of the power struggles and conspiracies of the inner court isthe first common denominator of these writings. Although the CCPofficial version of the Cultural Revolution dictates that Mao launchedthe Cultural Revolution because of his misperception and misunder-standing of the issue of class and class struggle, writers like Ye Yongliedo not bother to refer to the issue, let alone take it into consideration.


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The popular story line of power struggle goes like this: Mao firstwanted to get rid of Liu Shaoqi, then he wanted to finish with Lin Biao,and then he wanted to topple Zhou Enlai. In other words, whoeverheld the most powerful position after himself, and was therefore mostthreatening to his personal power, was Mao’s target.

Many of these writers accept the late-Mao thesis of two differentMaos, the early and later Mao. The later Mao became an emperor, likeany other emperor in Chinese history, only more talented and morebrutal. Mao was the only CCP leader who was thoroughly read inancient Chinese history and imperial conspiracy, and was therefore anextremely skilful power player. His supreme strategy was to make useof one faction in the CCP to defeat his designated enemy, and then useanother faction to defeat his former supporters.

In fact, as Teiwes’ research has demonstrated, Mao’s supreme posi-tion in the CCP after the establishment of the PRC was never and couldnever be seriously challenged. However, most of these Chinese writersdo not attempt to come to terms with this fact. It is true that more andmore writings begin to draw our attention to the fact that Lin Biaohated formality and he himself (if not his wife Ye Chun and son LinLiguo) might never have wanted to be the chairman of the state, a posi-tion supposedly threatening to Mao (Teiwes and Sun 1996). However,the question of whether Mao and Lin had disagreement on the issue ofpolicies has never been properly addressed. Only recently in hismemoirs published in Hong Kong does Wu Faxian (2006) reveal that asearly as in 1968 Lin Biao and Mao openly disagreed over the directionof the Cultural Revolution. The question of why Mao, a dying manhimself, wanted to criticize another dying man, Zhou Enlai, is notasked. It is simply assumed to be a personal power struggle. Butstruggle for what?

What were the roles of the ordinary Chinese men and womenduring the era of Mao? They are depicted as simply misled, deceivedand cheated. The Red Guards were fanatic mobs and the workers andpeasants were uneducated idiots who only knew how to follow theiremperor blindly like ants.16 All that mattered was the elite powerstruggle. Thus, Jiang Qing’s ultimate ambition was to ascend to a posi-tion like that of Empress Wu Zetian.17 According to these writers, JiangQing deserved to be despised and held in contempt by the old revolu-tionaries because this ‘third-rate’ actress in the decadent Shanghaishould not have seduced the Chairman of the CCP.

Another radical, Jiang Qing’s close associate Zhang Chunqiao, wasalso depicted as a Peking opera villain. All Zhang Chunqiao wantedwas to climb up to higher positions. He had no beliefs of his own andall he did in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution was to usurppower. Kang Sheng was a goutou junshi (dog-headed adviser) whose


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only ambition and pleasure was to frame the good and the honest. Fora long time and with the exception of few writers such as GuanWeixun, Wen Feng and Zhang Zhenglong, Lin Biao was depicted as aliangmianpai (double-faced cheat). Lin Biao said all the good words thatcould have been said in public and did all the wicked deeds that couldhave been done behind the scenes (haohua shuojing, huaishi zuo jue).18

It is true that Lin praised Mao with extreme flattery but notsubservient language (Teiwes and Sun 1996), but Lin was also one of thevery few people who dared to confront Mao and did so on several occa-sions. For instance, during the Long March soon after the Zunyi Confer-ence, Lin Biao wrote a letter demanding that Mao give the command ofthe army to Peng Dehuai because Lin thought Mao had made the RedArmy soldiers move forwards and backwards without any apparentstrategy. On the May Day parade in 1971, Lin broke away from the usualprotocol of arriving earlier at the Tian’anmen Rostrum to meet Mao.Instead he kept Mao waiting by arriving late. Then he left earlier, delib-erately without saying anything to Mao. On the other hand, Lin Biaowas never reported to have attacked Mao behind Mao’s back.

In these Chinese writings, the politics was played out as courtintrigue. The narrative is a copy of the classic Chinese novel of Romanceof the Three Kingdoms, only the three kingdoms are not states but threeCCP leadership compounds: Zhongnanhai (where Mao and Zhoulived and worked), Maojiawan (where Lin Biao lived) and Diaoyutai(where Jiang Qing and the Cultural Revolution Small Group worked).By the same token, the question of policies and ideas is irrelevant. The19 years of PRC history from 1957 to 1976 are seen simply as a succes-sion of Mao’s consistent errors, stupidity and fantasies, which weremade use of by the evil people surrounding him, but luckily resistedand corrected by the wise, the educated – the best people in Chinesesociety – who were later vindicated.

The big picture of China in the international environment of thecold war is ignored. The issue of alternative models for modernizingChina is never considered. A whole range of social and political issuesin such a complex society is irrelevant. The affirmative policy towardswomen in society is now forgotten.19 The attempt to reform the educa-tional system (Pepper 1996) was interpreted as simply intended todestroy China’s education. The policies to narrow the gap betweenmental and manual labour, between the urban and the rural, andbetween industry and agriculture were anti-intellectual and anti-human. The experiment to reform literature and art, notably in thePeking opera (Dao 1994), so as to reverse a thousand years of practiceof writing about and writing for the elite is seen simply as a plot tomake everyone ignorant, and is depicted in black and white terms ascultural obscurantism.


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According to this version of history, in the space of 19 years, noeconomic progress was made.20 Had there not been the Great LeapForward and the Cultural Revolution, China would have developed itseconomy in the same way as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and SouthKorea. The question of size, the tortuous path dependence and issuesof international politics are cast aside for the sake of emotional specu-lation. In economic development, writers see no connection, no causeand effect, between what happened in the Mao era and what happenedin the post-Mao period. It is as if the China’s economy sprangsuddenly from a desert after the death of Mao.

Though the above generalization of characteristics does not apply toevery author – Bo Yibo for example is far more sophisticated than whatis sketched here – I believe the sketch is an accurate description of thegeneral picture: the power struggle narrative manufactured by thepost-Mao elite.

Narrative style: jishi wenxue

A common characteristic employed by most biographers in China,though not so much by memoir and autobiography writers, is the jishiwenxue style of writing, literally meaning ‘literature of recording theactual events’. In the name of being shengdong bizhen (vivid, and lively),said to be the heritage of China’s ancient historian Sima Qian, anec-dotes are turned into a story of real characters, with their dialoguespresented in quotation marks. It is fiction in form, but claims to consistof historical facts. Thus, facts are mixed with imagination and argu-ments are replaced by fantasies. Few writers bother to give anyfootnotes and there are never any citations of sources.

In the extreme version of this jishi wenxue, positive characters havedignified postures and movements. They speak the right language andthink the right thoughts. They look good and they walk straight. Nega-tive characters are ugly and stupid. Whatever they do or say isdespicable and to be condemned. Positive characters are models to becopied and their behaviour is to be imitated, whereas negative charac-ters are to be despised and hated. There is no ambiguity orambivalence and the characters involved are either clear-cut goodies orstraightforward baddies. The goodies possess no vices and are thor-oughly good, even before they are born. The baddies are bad from thebeginning to the end.

The case of Chen Yi, the Minister of Foreign Affairs when theCultural Revolution started in 1966, is a good example of this versionof history. Chen is portrayed as an upright and outspoken goodie whowas against the Cultural Revolution from the very beginning and wascritical of the baddie Lin Biao from the start. But in fact Chen was very


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active in following the Cultural Revolution ideas initially. He namedthree of his senior officals as niugui sheshen (cow ghosts and snakedemons – a term referring to bad elements, from which the term‘cowshed’ was later taken to refer to the Cultural Revolution victims)at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Chen openly called hisaudience to support Mao’s struggle against the capitalist reactionaryline (meaning against Liu and Deng) and he said he had to learn fromLin Biao because Lin Biao was Mao’s best student (Wang Li 2001: 686).Like Chen Yi, Zhou Enlai also tried very hard to follow Mao during theCultural Revolution (Wang Li 2001: 924). The Chinese official versionof history tries to avoid these inconvenient facts.

Another example can be seen in the way Ye Yonglie portrays ChenBoda as a traitor of the Communist Party. In the history of the CCPrevolution the issue of renegade or traitor to the revolutionary causehas been treated very seriously (Dutton 1992 and 2005). This is under-standable in a sense because the CCP started as an undergroundmovement and had enormous damage done to its organization byinsiders who changed their coat. Liu Shaoqi was expelled from theparty during the Cultural Revolution because he was supposedlyproved to be a traitor. The accusations against Liu and others such BoYibo have been judged groundless since the Cultural Revolution, butthe post-Mao authorities still continue the practice from which theythemselves had suffered. Chen Boda had been accused of being atraitor and Ye Yonglie, in his biography of Chen, still writes as if it wasa fact that Chen was a traitor (Wang Li 2001: 752).

Chinese tradition of historiography

Writers such as Ye Yonglie are not only very much immersed in thesetechniques but also seem to be aware of their role of constructinghistory along the Chinese historiographic tradition. TraditionalChinese historiography concentrates on four techniques: ji zhu,zhuanxiu, kaozhu and hengping (record/archives, compiling, examina-tion/verification and evaluation/commentary). The last is the mostpowerful and most practised: the task of historiography is to makejudgements of who is good and bad so that later generations can followand copy them as examples and counter-examples.

In this tradition there was very little practice of evaluating themethodology of historiography, very little criticism of historiographyitself. The idea of historical methodology started in Tang Dynasty, verylate in Chinese history, when Liu Zhiji wrote shi tong (understandinghistory). But Liu was ignored by later establishment historiography.Even Yongle dadian (the Yongle Encyclopaedia), which was meant toinclude everything known by humans at that time, did not include shi


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tong. This is not surprising as Chinese historiography was designed towrite history that serves the present (Unger 2002). As early as the Springand Autumn Period historians were determined to make ‘the disloyaltreacherous officials fear’. Qing historians were ordered to use the sametechnique and ideology to evaluate Ming history so that examples couldbe set for Qing officials. The function of historians was to establish exam-ples for officials by condemning the bad and by praising the good.According to Chen Shengyong (1994), this is the case with the importantclassical history books Zuo zhuan (The Commentary of Zuo), Shi ji (TheHistorical Record), Han shu (The Book of Han), San guo zhi (The Recordof the Three Kingdoms) and Zizhi tongjian (The Comprehensive Recordas a Mirror for Rulers).

Memories as history

Despite the limitations of this category of literature, occasional excep-tions can provide insights and valuable information if one ploughsthrough them with a critical attitude. In one book, for instance, Quanprovides some personal insight into Peng Dehuai’s downfall. Quanreveals that at the 1959 Lushan Conference, Mao, who was intendingto cool down the Great Leap Forward, initially did not find Peng’sletter criticizing the Great Leap Forward too offensive. Mao thoughtthat Peng had ‘zichanjieji dongyaoxing (bourgeois vacillation) and onlycommented that Peng always gave him negative material. Mao stillintended to conclude the conference as had been scheduled. However,when Mao gave his final speech, Peng chose not to sit with othermembers of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, who, accordingto the customary hierarchical arrangement, were to sit on a (raised)platform facing the less prominent party officials. Instead, Peng took aseat at a back row among the lesser mortals, with his head recentlyshaven bald, a clear sign of challenge. Mao remarked that if the armydid not want to follow him he could lead another guerrilla war.According to Quan this remark was directed at Peng, who was theMinister of Defence, a typical dry humour of Mao.

After the speech, Mao and Peng bumped into each other when theycame out of the conference hall. Mao smiled at Peng, and took theinitiative in greeting him and invited him to have a talk, to which Pengreplied in a loud voice, ‘There is nothing to talk about!’ and walked off.This encounter took place in front of many senior CCP leaders. Laterwhen Mao went back to his residence several ‘CCP leaders’ came tooffer critical remarks about Peng and suggested to Mao that the confer-ence should be prolonged to solve the problem of ‘the strugglebetween the two lines’. Quan’s account offers an angle that is absentfrom the version offered by Li Rui, which is widely accepted in the


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West. Quan’s account is insightful because it reveals the role of otherplayers. Moreover, it reveals, from a bodyguard’s point of view, theconsequences of breaching the accepted norms and values of main-taining unity at least on the surface, and of respecting hierarchy inChinese political culture.

There are other valuable insights and information found in thesememoirs and biographies. For instance, Wu Lengxi’s memoirs clearlyshow that the theory of revisionism and continuous revolution articu-lated in the Nine Commentaries on the Soviet Union’s Revisionism ofMarxism-Leninism was not an excuse for power struggle but a result ofserious ideological consideration in the context of what was happeningin Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Wu De’s oral history account(2004) shows that for Mao at that time there was a genuine fear of arevisionist coup, though clearly from hindsight there was not even anattempt at one. According to Wu De, General Ye Jianying had shuffledthe Beijing garrison, ordered two divisions of the field army to Beijingunder instructions from Mao and Lin Biao. It was only after the generalhad taken control of the public security in the capital in May 1966 thatMao felt it was safe for him to return to it.

Wu De (2004) also reveals that Mao actually advised Li Xuefeng,the new boss of Beijing after the downfall of the former Mayor PengZhen, to go to Inner Mongolia or Tianjin to escape the heat of themass movement as the Cultural Revolution unfolded. Clearly, Maowanted to protect the party officials, or at least some of them, but atthe same time he wanted them exposed and criticized by the masses.This is also shown by Mao’s talk about Jian Bozan, the well-knownhistorian of Beijing University. Mao said that Jian wrote so manybooks that we could not criticize him since we had not read them. Wehad better let the students who read him do the criticism, Mao said.Mao applied the same mass line with the issue of education reform.He said that as we did not know the profession we had to rely on themasses, that is, the students and teachers to carry out the reforms;hence the rationale for closing down schools before the students hada say on education reform.

Some of the memoirs, biographies and autobiographies by armyofficers reveal that though they never wanted to question their loyaltyto Mao they passively resisted and actively undermined some of theCultural Revolution efforts. For instance, some army officers recalledhow they did not like Jiang Qing or Yao Wenyuan’s instruction to crit-icize Deng Xiaoping (Xiao Ke 1997, Wang Ping 1992, Li Zhimin 1993and Yang Qian and Zhang Zuoguang 1987). According to Xu Hail-iang’s recent interview study, in the Wuhan Incident of 1967 the armyofficers of the local garrison not only kidnapped the Cultural Revolu-tion radicals Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi but also directly challenged Zhou


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Enlai when he went to Wuhan to deal with the Wuhan situation. In factthe Incident, which took place under Mao’s nose, was intended to givehim a warning, as the army officers knew he was in Wuhan at that time(Xu 2005). Mao indeed took notice of the warning and the CulturalRevolution radicals Wang Li and Guan Feng were dismissed not longafter the Incident.

Conclusion: discourse, narratives and memories

Just as there is reason to question the historiography approach takenby the Confucian scholars, so there is no reason not to questioncontemporary memoirs, biographies and autobiographies whoseapproach is similar. Even in the Western context, where there is ahigher degree of scholarly scrutiny, memoirs, biographies and autobi-ographies cannot be taken at face value. As the distinguished Englishbiographer Richard Holms says, ‘biography is essentially and by itsvery origin disputable’ (Hacking 1995:238). That this is the case can bedemonstrated by a book in this genre that is widely known in the West,Wild Swans by Jung Chang. In a fine study of Chang’s Wild Swans andYang’s Spider Eaters, Kong argues that Chang’s memoirs are ‘self-invention’, ‘idealized self-justification’ (Kong Shuyu 1999:241), and‘full of imaginative reconstruction of events, using hindsight to alterher recollections’ (1999:246). Chang ‘has altered her story to suit thewishes of hindsight and her market audience, and … her memory haschanged past events to make her behaviour seem more decisive andless shameful’ (1999:247).

Throughout this book, I have consistently argued that how oneunderstands the Cultural Revolution depends on what theoreticalframework or approach one adopts. The discourse that was taken forgranted at the time of the Cultural Revolution can be judged verydifferently when different approaches are employed. By this I mean thelogic, the rationale and language at the time when history was takingplace can either be judged on its own terms or on different terms. Onits own terms of the Cultural Revolution discourse, the Chinese peopleand the Chinese leadership were rational beings like any other and hada set of beliefs and perceptions to regulate their behaviour.

Now the dominant beliefs and perceptions are different and there-fore it is to be expected that writers of biographies, memoirs andautobiographies use contemporary beliefs and perceptions to writeabout past history. The term theoretical framework can be replaced byanother term, ‘interpretive category’, used by Hacking when he talksabout memory restructuring. Hacking argues that we have a tendencyto specify the past through actions that fall under a new interpretivecategory, and to think of actions or incidents as ‘semantic contagion’. If


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I begin to think of my past as one of ‘wasted opportunity’; I will startto formulate actions and incidents that admit to this description.

If the writer of a biography, memoirs or autobiography begins touse the interpretive category of power struggle and economic disasterto look at Mao and the Cultural Revolution, then he or she will findevidence to prove that thesis. The category of memoirs, biographiesand autobiographies in Chinese has done exactly that.


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4 Mao, The Unknown Story: anintellectual scandal

Introduction: hyper-promotion of a book

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday became abest seller soon after it was released in the UK, Australia and NewZealand in 2005. The book was promoted by such media frenzy thatone of the reviews by the British Guardian is titled ‘The book that willshake the world’. The BBC programme Off the Shelf – more commonlydevoted to fiction – gave a ‘dramatic’ reading of excerpts of the bookin a ‘voice dripping with cynicism and irony’ (Weil 2006). One of thereviewers calls the book ‘a work of unanswerable authority. … Mao iscomprehensively discredited from beginning to end in small ways andlarge; a murderer, a torturer, an untalented orator, a lecher, a destroyerof culture, an opium profiteer, a liar’ (Hensher 2005).

The Australian newspaper, a broadsheet paper, collected varioustrend-setting writers and journalists in Australia and asked them tochoose a 2005 Book of the Year. One of the choices by a senior jour-nalist, Nicolas Rothwell is Mao: The Unknown Story. This is what hesaid: reading the book about ‘the 20th century’s most bloodstaineddictator was a litmus event. … I cannot recall finishing a book thatinspired in me such sharp feelings of nausea, horror and despair’(Rothwell 2005: R5)

Jonathan Mirsky (2005a, 2005b), a seasoned journalist who writesfor papers such as the British Observer and New York Times states thatthe book proves that Mao ‘was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did asmuch damage to mankind as they did’. Montefiore (2005) declares,‘Mao is the greatest monster of them all – the Red Emperor of China’.‘China’s Monster, Second to None’ is the title of another review in theNew York Times (Kakutani 2005), whose author declares that the bookmakes ‘an impassioned case for Mao as the most monstrous tyrant ofall times’. In the New York Times Book Review Nicholas D. Kristof(2005) declares the book is ‘magnificent biography’ and a ‘magister-ial’ work. The last Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Pattern, and theinfluential German Spiegel declared their endorsement of the book.Andrew Nathan could not bring himself to endorse the blatant viola-tion of scholarly norms in the book but still thinks the book containsjade (Nathan 2005). For Willliam Hutton (2005), an influential Britishpolitical commentator:

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Whether it’s the news that Mao never actually marched in longstretches of the Long March but was, instead, carried in abamboo litter he designed himself, or of the scale of his purgesand executions, this is a catalogue of disclosures that overturnsalmost all our received wisdom. The impact will be substantial.It’s an impressive achievement.

(Hutton 2005)

‘Chang’s new book is actually a vast work of scholarship rather thanan emotionally-charged personal attack,’ asserts Thorpe (2005). Changand Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode inMao’s tumultuous life, claims Yahuda (2005), a veteran scholar of theLondon School of Economics.

Scholarship, what scholarship?

Of course, anyone can make any claims about anything. What isspecial about Mao: The Unknown Story is that the claims are supposedto have been backed up by scholarship and painstaking research. Whathas impressed journalists, political commentators and some academicsalike is that Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim to have consultedsomething like 1,200 written sources, the majority of them in Chinese,and to have interviewed 400 people. The book has an impressivedisplay of 68 pages of notes. It took the husband and wife co-authorsmore than a decade to finish the book, we are told.

The interviewee list

Let us first start with the impressive list of people whom the authorsclaim to have interviewed. These include dignitaries such as AndrásHegedüs, a prime minister of Hungary, Prince Mikasa, brother of theJapanese Emperor Hirohito, Eugenio Anguiano, a certain Mexicanambassador to Beijing, Frank Corner, a foreign minister of NewZealand, and Lech Walesa, former President of Poland. Of course HisHoliness the Dalai Lama must be included in the list. With enormousfinancial resource and prestige from the success of Wild Swans, Changcould interview anyone she wished. But the question is: what doesLech Walesa or a prime minister of Hungary know about Mao orChina?

The list of course also includes many who do or could claim toknow about Mao or China, such as Joseph Needham, Steven Fitzgerald(first Australian ambassador to PRC China), Mao’s daughter Li Na,Mao’s grandson Mao Xinyu, or Liu Shaoqi’s widow Wang Guangmei.At first sight such an extensive list might make the book appear


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authoritative. However, it begs a number of questions. First, onewould like to see whether the interviewees have said anything that isrelevant to the content or arguments of the book about Mao.

Second, we would like to know how Chang and Halliday dealt withinterview information that was contrary to what they set out to prove.Professor Frederick Teiwes is a well-known scholar on CCP elite poli-tics and he is listed in the book’s acknowledgements. According toTeiwes, he had met Jung Chang a couple of times but could not sayanything substantial about the subject on Mao because Chang wouldnot listen unless what he had to say suited her predetermined ideas.An indication of what Teiwes thinks of the book is that he declined toparticipate in the special issue to review the book organized by TheChina Journal.

Yes, we are told that Chang interviewed Mao’s daughter and agrandson, but do we know what Li Na said about her father and whatMao Xinyu said about his grandfather? It is a standard practice inscholarly writing that you list a source only if it is referred to or citedin the text. If you do not want to tell the reader what an interviewee hassaid, you cannot include that interviewee as your source of evidence.

How evidence is selected: the example of Gong Chu

In a sense every piece of writing or book aims to argue for or againstsomething and therefore has to select its own evidence, but the selec-tion must be seen as reasonable and justifiable in the context of existingknowledge or known evidence. Scholarship of any acceptable sensehas to engage with the existing literature and address opposing viewsand evidence. Throughout the book Chang and Halliday often write asif there is no scholarship on the subject. If they do cite something fromsome publication it is to serve the purpose of their agenda to demonizeMao.

Here is one of many examples. Gong Chu, a former senior RedArmy officer, who worked with Mao during the early period of theCCP revolution but gave up and ran away to live in Hong Kong beforehe could see the day of communist victory, published his memoirs inHong Kong. Chang and Halliday cite Gong as an insider, but only toprovide out of context evidence that Mao was a cunning power-hungry manipulator who was cruel but good at nothing. When I readGong’s memoirs I found that the image of Mao that emerges in Gong’sbook is entirely different from the one presented in Chang and Hall-iday. Gong’s book published in 1978 shows that Mao had ups anddowns during the early period of the CCP revolution and was asvulnerable and emotional as any other normal person. When he talkedto Gong about how he was oppressed and dismissed by Zhou Enlai,

M A O, T H E U N K N O W N S TO RY

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Mao even shed tears (Gong 1978: 550). Gong states clearly that the firstand the clearest understanding of the rural nature of the Chinese revo-lution came from Mao, and therefore the fact that Mao became theleader of CCP was not due to any luck or accident (Gong 1978: 493).Gong also testifies that land reform in the Jiangxi Revolutionary basearea under Mao was mild and did not victimize rich peasants.However when the CCP central leadership from Shanghai, headed byZhou Enlai, arrived in 1931 they struggled against Mao’s funong luxian(rich peasant line) and Zhou Enlai wanted to xiaomie dizhu, zancaochugen (liquidate the landlord like uprooting the grass). When GongChu made plain his opposition by saying that the policy was tooradical and that many so-called landed estates were just householdswith very little land it was Zhou, not Mao, who expelled Gong fromthe party for a year.

Referencing: a clever deception

The 68 pages of notes in Chang and Halliday have been used as anembellishment designed to impress some readers and to intimidateothers intellectually. Instead of using either in-text referencing ornumbered footnotes (or endnotes) as is the accepted convention in ascholarly work, a very unusual reference format is adopted in thebook, as we shall see below. If the book was fiction and was meant tobe such then there would not have been any discussion concerning thenotes. But since The Unknown Story is meant to tell factual and docu-mentary truth about Mao and about what happened in such a largecountry for so long, it is expected that the claims made are backed upby evidence. The book gives the appearance of having done that, buthas it actually?

The appearance is powerfully deceptive. Let us examine how this isthe case. In the text, except for occasional footnotes indicated by a starsign, there is no indication of referencing. The reader who cares aboutreferencing needs to go to the Notes section at the end of the book inwhich references are arranged like this: in each chapter book pages arelisted, then following the page number is a phrase in bold that is eithera direct quote from the book or key words about what is discussed.Here are the first few lines of the ‘Notes’ section on page 677, withreferences to the text in Chapter 1.

Chapter 1 On the Cusp from Ancient to ModernPage3 Found out emperor’s death: Snow 1973, p. 138.3-4 Parents: Snow 1973, pp. 130–4: *Mao Clan Chronicle: Mao’sfather-in-law Yang Chang-chi’s diary, 5 Apr. 1915, in *Mao 1990,


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p. 636 (E:MRTP Vol. 2, p. 60): Li Xiangwen, pp. 25–51: *ZhaoZhichao, pp. 273–4: visit to Shaoshan and conversations withlocals.

As readers we want to be assured that what we are told is an honestpresentation of what the author has found. We want to be assuredthat evidence is presented as accurately as possible and otherpeople’s research and arguments are treated fairly and reasonably.References are offered so that the assumption of honesty, integrity,fairness and reasonableness can be checked and confirmed. However,in the kind of references arranged in the Chang and Halliday bookwe encounter a problem straightway. For instances on page 3 and 4of the book there are quite a few things said about Mao’s parents, butin the references shown above it is not clear how to check the infor-mation because there is no indication as to which reference is thesource of which bit of information about Mao’s parents.

There can be many references listed in the Notes section for one pageof text. This gives an appearance of scholarship and painstaking research.No wonder so many journalists take the claimed findings seriously.However, the referencing actually suffers from some serious problems.The following is one of many examples. The text on page 97 is:

Once he had tightened his grip on the army, Mao turned his atten-tion to the Jiangxi Communists. On 3 December he sent Lie witha list of his foes to the town of Futian, where the Jiangxi leaderswere living. Mao condemned the meeting in August which hadexpelled his ally Lieu as an ‘AB meeting’ which ‘opposed MaoTse-tung’. ‘Put them all down’, he ordered, and then ‘slaughter enmasse in all counties and all districts’. ‘Any place that does notarrest and slaughter members of the Party and government ofthat area must be AB, and you can simply seize and deal withthem [xun-ban, implying torture and/or liquidation].’

The references for the above paragraph are

Mao Order, 3 Dec. 1930: in Dai & Luo, pp. 94–6, see a follow-up letter on5 Dec., in Vladmirov, 10 Nov. 1943 (mis-dated 15th). ‘AB meeting’: Maoto Shanghai, 20 Dec. 1930, *ZDJC vol. 14, p. 636 (E: MRTP vol. 3, pp.704–5); *Liou Di, letter to Shanghai, 11 Jan. 1931, RGASPI, cit.; *Provin-cial Action Committee, Emergency Announcement no. 9, 15 Dec. 1930RGASPI, 514/1/1008. Lie torture: ibid.

The text is meant to say that Mao ordered the slaughter of his oppo-nents in large numbers. But how do we know whether this is not just


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Chang and Halliday’s claim that is not supported by evidence? First ofall, the first note entry ‘Mao order, 3 Dec. 1930’ is not exactly thewording in the text. We therefore cannot be sure what Mao ordered.Second, the text aims to show Mao ordered the mass slaughter of hisopponents, but which reference is it that is cited for this claim? Is it thecitation of Dai & Luo and Vladmirov? According to the order ofappearance these two references are cited only to refer to the textbefore ‘AB meeting’, but the ‘slaughter’ sentence appears only after‘AB meeting’ in the text. Are we to understand then that it is the cita-tion of ‘Mao to Shanghai, 20 Dec. 1930, *ZDJC vol. 14, p. 636 (E: MRTPvol. 3, pp. 704–5); *Liou Di, letter to Shanghai, 11 Jan. 1931, RGASPI,cit.; *Provincial Action Committee, Emergency Announcement no. 9, 15Dec. 1930 RGASPI, 514/1/1008’ that supports the ‘slaughter’ state-ment? Or are these references actually citations for the ‘AB meeting’?Third, the sentence ‘Put them all down’, he ordered, and then‘slaughter en masse in all counties and all districts’ does not makesense. Does it mean that Mao ordered his opponents to be put downand then slaughtered? One would think that the sentence in quotationmarks is a translation from Chinese or Russian by the co-authors. Onewould understand the first part of the sentence ‘put them all down’means ‘to get rid of them by killing them’ which is the same as thesecond part of the sentence ‘slaughter en masse’ What is the word‘then’ in the sentence for? What is possible, or what the co-authorspossibly mean to say, is that Mao gave the order by saying ‘put themall down’ then someone else carried out the order and ‘slaughtered’them. If that is the case why don’t the co-authors do that?

Appearance and instant satisfaction

What is clear is that the authors cannot support their claims as well asmight first appear. There are many examples in the text. A commonmove employed by the authors is to cite a reference or even referencesto a trivial statement or a piece of insignificant information, which isthen followed immediately by a substantial or serious claim withoutreference. There is a source cited for the statement that ‘On 29 May hehad to return to Red Jiangxi’ (p. 118). But immediately after this Changand Halliday claim that Mao led ‘the tens of thousands of troops’ into‘an isolated cul-de-sac’ and ‘a large number fell ill and died’ (p. 118), aclaim made without any supporting source. However, because there isa reference to the first sentence the appearance is that the substantialclaim is also backed by a reference.

The reader who is not a professional in the field would not take thetrouble to check whether the claims made in the book have really beenmade on solid evidence. This is clever showmanship: it is difficult to


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distinguish between what is authentic and what is a fake. One Chinesewriter Zhang Xianliang commented, after his first visit to Singaporeand some other modern cities in the West, that in these developedplaces real flowers look fake and plastic fake flowers look real.

Chang and Halliday have deployed the technique skilfully. With thefaçade of scholarship established they can then insert crucial claimshere and there even though these claims are not properly backed up.How do we find out what is real and what is fake? In our popularculture of instant satisfaction: we do not care so long as it looks right.

Misleading claims and absurd explanations

In trying to explain why Mao turned out to be a decisive leader of theJiangxi Revolutionary base areas during the late 1920s and early 1930s,contrary to what Gong Chu testifies, Chang tries very hard to sell themessage that Mao was good for nothing in military affairs and that itwas his personal ruthlessness and Stalin’s support that helped Mao tothe top. Why did Stalin support Mao instead of someone else? Onereason was that ‘Mao’s drive assumed urgent importance’ to Moscowbecause Russia wanted to invade Manchuria (p. 75). What was this‘Mao’s drive’ that was so appreciated by Moscow? The book claimsthat another reason for Stalin’s support of Mao was that the firstGeneral Secretary of the CCP Chen Duxiu was then turning Trotskyist,and Stalin was afraid that Mao might side with Chen since Chen washis mentor (p. 75). But there is no evidence to back up such a claim.

There are more extraordinary claims: ‘The Party had handed him[Mao] the biggest Red Army outside the Soviet bloc after he hadbroken all the rules. Moscow and Shanghai were palpably bribing him,which meant they needed him.’ Why would Moscow and CCP inShanghai want to bribe him if Mao not only ‘broke all rules’ but wasalso such a hopeless good for nothing? Why would the Party andMoscow need Mao? The whole matter is made so mysterious simplybecause The Unknown Story does not want the reader even to contem-plate the possibility that it was Mao’s military and organizations skillsthat made him successful.

In order to denigrate the character of Mao, The Unknown Story hasgood fun in telling a story that Mao was a selfish and greedy bastard,‘consuming plenty of milk (a rarity for the Chinese), as well as a kilo ofbeef stewed into soup every day, with a whole chicken on top’ (p. 75).Regardless of whether there was beef in Jiangxi on a daily basis at thattime (there could not have been cattle in Jiangxi and water buffaloeswere precious farming animals), was it humanly possible to digest akilo of beef in addition to a whole chicken every day?

A good example of how The Unknown Story treats documentary


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sources is its comment on a report of the death of Mao’s first wife, YangKaihui. According to the co-authors, the day after Yang was executedthe local Hunan Republican Daily ran a headline ‘Wife of Mao Tse-tungexecuted yesterday – everyone claps and shouts with satisfaction’. Tosome credulous Western reader, this is an example of how the authorsworked hard to research Chinese sources, as local newspapers in the1930s were consulted. After citing these words, Chang and Halliday’scomment: ‘This undoubtedly reflected more loathing of Mao than ofKai-hui’ (p. 83). The authors do not even contemplate the possibilitythat one cannot simply take what the local papers said at that time asa given fact, when communist activists were hunted down as ‘bandits’by the then Nationalist government.

Regarding Mao’s relation with Yang Kaihui, The Unknown Storycharges:

During his [Mao’s] assault on Changsha, Mao made no effort toextricate her and their sons, or even to warn her. And he couldeasily have saved her: her house was on his route to the city; andMao was there for three weeks. Yet he did not lift a finger (p. 91).

There is no evidence to back up such an extraordinary charge. Thereare numerous claims of this nature made in the book withoutsupporting evidence. For example here is the first sentence in the book:‘Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives ofone-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-centuryleader’ (incidentally China’s population had for decades been not ‘one-quarter’ but a fifth of the world’s). And there are more: ‘In lateSeptember [Mao] started his slaughter’ (p. 91), and ‘Moscow alsoappointed Mao head of the state’ (p. 104). ‘Given that escapes werefew, this means that altogether some 700,000 people died in the Ruijinbase. More than half of these were murdered as “class enemies”, orwere worked to death, or committed suicide, or died other prematuredeaths attributable to the regime’ (p. 113–4).

The book is filled with accusations like these without any evidence orsources to back up. How did Chang and Halliday come up with a figureof 700,000 deaths in Ruijin, for instance? The Unknown Story cites twosources referring to the population drop of 20 per cent in Red Jiangxi (p.113). Even if these figures of population drop were true, they do not giveany evidence to the claim that all these people actually died – they couldhave migrated to other areas because of the civil war – or the claim thatmore than half of them died as ‘class enemies’ of the revolution; some ofthem could have been killed by the Nationalists who would not allowthe existence of a revolutionary state within a state.


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After claiming that Shao Li-tzu – a prominent KMT official, who, onChiang Kai-shek’s instructions, took the latter’s son to Moscow tostudy – was a CCP mole, The Unknown Story declares that ‘Ultimately,the agents played a gigantic role in helping deliver China to Mao’(p.139). As if China could just be delivered to Mao with the help of a fewKMT agents. Anyone who believes this kind of stuff is like those whobelieve that the Bible is literally the history of humanity.

Further evidence of ‘scholarship’

Jung Chang is said to be the first person from the PRC to have obtaineda PhD degree in linguistics at a UK university. One would expect herto be familiar with the spelling of Chinese names in English. As anindication of what kind of scholarship is involved in The UnknownStory, it is worth devoting a few sentences to the way Chinese namesare spelt in the book. One should not be surprised that ‘Peking’ is stillused in the book instead of ‘Beijing’, since Chang would hate to use aterm that is initiated by a regime that she now hates so much.However, violation of other conventions that are common knowledgeto even a first-year undergraduate student of Chinese is reallypuzzling. Chang, if not Halliday, should know that in Chinese,surnames comes first and given names come second. However, Changchooses to refer to a Chinese person by the given name. Thus Li Li-shan, a party notable, is referred to as ‘Li-shan’ and Mao’s wife YangKai-hui is referred to as ‘Kai-hui’. This is the equivalent of referring toMarx as ‘Karl’ in scholarly writing.

In spelling Chinese names there are two main systems used all overthe world. One is the old Wade-Giles system invented by the mission-aries and one is the new Pinyin system stipulated by the PRCgovernment. For cataloguing Chinese resources the Wade-Giles systemused to be the standard. Increasingly the Pinyin system has been intro-duced into library cataloguing. In order to cater for both the older andyounger generation of users, some libraries have both systems avail-able. In academic writing one can either adopt one system or another.The norm is to adopt one consistent approach, except for names ofwell-known figures that have been used for a long time. However, TheUnknown Story is not consistent in using one system or the other. Theauthors mix the two systems any way they want.

That is fine, except when their spelling implies erroneous phonetics.For example in the Wade-Giles system in order to make a differencebetween the aspirated versus non-aspirated sound, an apostrophe isused to indicate aspiration. Thus ‘chi’ has a very different sound qualityto ‘ch’i’. In the Pinyin system this difference of sound quality is made byspelling ‘chi’ as ‘ji’ and ‘ch’i’ as ‘qi’. However, our linguistics-doctorate


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author Chang does not make any difference at all. Mao’s father-in-law’sname Yang Changji (Pinyin) or Yang Ch’ang-chi (Wade-Giles) is spelt as‘Yang Chang-chi’ (part Pinyin and part Wade-Giles), and Liu Shaoqi(Pinyin) or Liu Shao-ch’i (Wade Giles) is spelt as ‘Liu Shao-chi’. The lastnames of Mr Yang and Mr Liu do not sound the same, but Chang spellsthem as if they do.

Further evidence of flaws and misleading claims

It is true that The Unknown Story is not without its critics. James Heart-field (2005) is one of the very few who makes a well-researched effortto expose the distortions contained in it. Kakutani also points out thelack of reference in the book to Mao’s ‘mature writings that might shedlight on his politics or values’, and the absence of historical context,calling the work ‘tendentious and one-dimensional’. Even Steve Tsangof Oxford University, a historian who has no love for Mao and the CCP,has to admit that ‘the authors had been ‘appallingly dishonest’ in theuse of sources they claimed to have accessed. Of course Tsang readilyagrees that ‘Mao was a monster,’ but regrets that ‘their distortion ofhistory to make their case will in the end make it more difficult toreveal how horrible Mao and the Chinese Communist Party systemwere, and how much damage they really did to the Chinese people’(quoted in Heartfield 2005).

To approach the subject of Mao, or anybody really, it is perfectlylegitimate to have an attitude. ‘You don’t feel cold analysis in this book,you feel hatred, which helps make it a wonderful read. But historyshould not work this way’, Francesco Sisci of La Stampa in Italy stateswith regret (McDonald 2005). Teiwes also regrets:

When someone [Mao] is responsible, and I believe he was, forupwards of 30 million deaths, it’s hard to defend him. … But onthe other hand to paint him as a totally monstrous personalitywho just goes out to kill people and protect his power at all costis not only over the top but a bit crazy in terms of what actuallywent on.

In order to do that, ‘She [Chang] just had her views so set, and wasunwilling to entertain other opinions or inconvenient evidence’(McDonald 2005).

Jung Chang claims to have interviewed the last surviving eyewitnessat Luding Bridge who was said to have confirmed that there was nobattle at the bridge during the Long March. When McDonald went toLuding he did not find a trace of Jung Chang’s witness. Instead, hefound another eyewitness confirming that a battle indeed took place


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(McDonald 2005). Davin points out in the Times Literary Supplement anumber of historical errors and speculative assumptions. One concernsthe death of Wang Shiwei. The Unknown Story asserts that Wang’s execu-tion was used by Mao to terrify the young intellectuals at Yan’an duringthe ‘rectification’ campaign of 1942. However the execution of Wang didnot actually take place until 1947 (Williems 2005); it was done withoutMao’s knowledge and Mao was reportedly furious about it.

‘There are numerous such accusations in the book. Unfortunately it isnot always so evident to expose them as mere fantasy’ (Williems 2005).‘Let me make it clear that I fully share the authors’ view that Mao was amonster, as were Hitler and Stalin,’ McLynn (2005) declares, but the bookhas ‘too much hate too little understanding’. Even Nathan, whosepublished political stand is clearly in line with that of Chang, has toadmit ‘that many of Chang and Halliday’s claims are based on distorted,misleading or far-fetched use of evidence’ (Nathan 2005).

Another good example of how Chang and Halliday distort andmisquote to make misleading statements is provided by Ball (2007).When discussing the Great Leap Forward, Chang and Halliday claimthat Mao did not care that people were dying from starvation. Changand Halliday quote Mao’s words at the Wuchang Conference that‘working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well haveto die’ as evidence to support their charge that Mao ‘was ready todispense with’ half of China’s population for the sake of Mao’s indus-trialization plan. But as Ball points out, the quote is taken out of thecontext of the whole speech. If one cares to examine the context whatMao actually meant to say was exactly the opposite of the Chang andHalliday claim: to warn his audience of the dangers of overwork andover enthusiasm in the Great Leap Forward.

When questioned about the sensational claim that the ChineseNationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, intentionally let the Red Armyescape on the historic Long March of 1934–1935, the authors, in theirdefence, point to their seemingly impressive references, the 26 sourcesfor the claim about the Long March. Nathan was compelled to ask ‘Ofthese 26 items, which one, two or three unequivocally support theimprobable claim that Chiang let the Reds escape intentionally?’(Fenby 2005) The answer, my friend, is none.

Logical inconsistency within the text

Jin, not a scholar of any known standing in the field, demonstrates thatone does not have to bring in any documentary evidence to repudiate17 of Chang and Halliday’s major claims. All one has to do is findlogical contradictions in the book itself. Here rephrased are a couple ofexamples pointed out by Jin.


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Red Army let go by Chiang

Chang and Halliday claim that Chiang Kai-shek let Mao’s Red Armyescape during the Long March. This claim is important for Chang andHalliday’s thesis that Mao was good for nothing. Why was Chiang, astaunch anti-communist who considered a communist victory moredangerous to China than Japanese invasion and occupation, willing tolet Mao escape? Because he did not want to risk the life of his son, whowas in the Soviet Union at that time, so Chang and Halliday say.However elsewhere in the book the authors also state that when SongQinling – Madam Sun Yat-sen of whom Chang and Halliday wrote apraiseworthy biography back in 1988 but now allege was anotherSoviet agent – appealed to Chiang to release two Chinese (a man calledNiu Lan and his wife) who were arrested as Soviet agents in return forthe homecoming of his son, Chiang refused. Jin asks, rightly, was theimprisonment of two little known Chinese more important than thedefeat of Mao’s Red Army to Chiang?

Mao didn’t walk during the Long March

Another claim in the book is that Mao was carried for long stretches ofthe Long March. One piece of evidence cited to support this claim isthe similar claim made by Zhang Guotao in his memoirs. But Zhang’smemoirs were written after he fell out with Mao and had defected tothe Nationalists. In any case, even Zhang does not claim that Mao wascarried all the time. Another piece of evidence is from Mao’s reportedconfession to his bodyguards when Mao said that during the LongMarch he was carried and therefore read a lot. Again Mao’s own wordsdo not lead to the conclusion that he was always carried around. Jinasks, rightly, if the Zhang and Halliday claim were true it would nothave been ‘unknown’ since the claim was already made by ZhangGuotao and what Mao said was published in his bodyguard YeZilong’s memoirs in 2000.

Murder of 70 million Chinese people

The first sentence of Chang and Halliday states that Mao was themurderer of 70 million Chinese. Of the 70 million one set of figures thatChang and Halliday produce in the text is the 27 million who weresupposed to have died in prisons or labour camps during the Mao era.How do the authors come up with these figures? Chang and Hallidayclaim that there were approximately 10 million prisoners in prisonsand labour camps in China every year during the 27 years of Mao’srule, and that the death rate was possibly as high as 10 per cent. There-


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fore, the death toll would be 10,000,000 x 10 per cent x 27 = 27,000,000.How did the figure of 10,000,000 come about? What was the source ofthe 10 per cent death rate? In any case, Jin asks, again rightly, on whatground could one draw a conclusion that every death in prison shouldhave been the responsibility of Mao?

As for the 38 million deaths attributed to the Great Leap Forwardfamine, Chang and Halliday do not get into any of the controversiesand different estimates that exist in the literature (Banister 1987,Coale 1984, Jin Hui 1993, Jiang Zhenghua and Li Na 1989, Li Chen-grui 1987, Kane 1988) but pick the highest death toll. Chang conve-niently omits the fact that her home-town province of Sichuan wasone of the worst-hit provinces during the difficult years. Changdoes not in her Wild Swans or The Unknown Story mention anyeyewitness account of death by starvation in her home province.Second, the Party Secretaries of other worst-hit provinces like WuZhipu of Henan, Zeng Xisheng of Anhui, Shu Tong of Shandong andZhang Zhongliang of Gansu were all sacked after the Great LeapForward disaster except Li Jingquan, the Party Secretary of Sichuan,Chang’s home province. One wonders why. If it was becauseSichuan managed to cover up the disaster so well, then it is reason-able to assume that Chang’s father must have done a good job sincehe was the Deputy Minster of the Propaganda Department ofSichuan province during the height of his career. What motivatesChang to rename her father’s Propaganda Department as PublicAffairs Department in her writings, Jin asks.

Mao, China’s Hitler and Stalin

Almost all Western commentators tend to agree with Chang and Hall-iday that Mao was like Hitler and Stalin. However it was publicknowledge that Mao, unlike Stalin and Hitler, did not execute any ofhis political rivals. Before Mao came to dominant positions in the CCPhe was sidelined and demoted by Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian and ZhouEnlai. Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian suffered in their careers and Zhangeven underwent humiliation later in life, but they were not executed byMao. Zhou Enlai served as the Premier of PRC until the last day of hislife. When Zhang Guotao, another of Mao’s rivals, defected to theNationalists Mao agreed to let his wife and children join him. Duringthe Sixth Congress of the CCP Mao worked hard to keep Wang Ming,another of Mao’s political opponents, as a member of the CCP CentralCommittee and Wang later migrated to the Soviet Union and diedthere. Peng Dehuai was demoted in 1959 and sidelined and humiliatedand even brutally beaten up by some Red Guards during the CulturalRevolution. But Peng died of bowel cancer in 1974. Liu Shaoqi was


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persecuted and humiliated; but he died of a natural death (though hemight have lived longer had he not suffered the strain of persecution).

Chang and Halliday have to admit that it was Mao who rejected areport recommending the execution of Liu Shaoqi’s wife. In order totwist this fact in their favour Chang and Halliday make a claim thatwould be comic if it were not for the fact that it was about life anddeath: that Mao wanted Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei’s slow deathby torture. So slow that Wang was still alive in the twenty-first century.In 2004 Wang even celebrated Mao’s birthday with the latter’s relatives(Kong Dongmei 2006). The meeting was called by Wang herself andorganized by one of Liu’s sons Liu Yuan. Photos were taken with WangGuangmei sitting between Mao’s two daughters Li Na and Li Min.

There are numerous other cases that show that Mao was not likeStalin or Hitler. When Mao was told of Lin Biao’s fleeing in a plane, heis reported to have ordered that the plane should not be shot, sayingtian yao xiayu, niang yao jiaren, rang ta qu ba (you cannot stop it if it rains,you cannot stop it if your mother wants to remarry; let him go). Thestory of Deng Xiaoping is well known: though humiliated and criti-cized Deng was never physically harmed. During the most turbulentdays of the Cultural Revolution in the second half of 1966, wheneveryone of the CCP hierarchy was under attack except Mao and LinBiao, Mao was determined to protect Zhu De and Chen Yi (Wang Li2001: 714), the two people who were very critical of Mao in the 1930sand, with Zhou Enlai, Zhu and Chen, were in fact responsible forremoving Mao from the command of the Red Army.

There is another example that shows that Mao judged people ontheir ideas. During the Great Leap Forward year of 1958, the Mayor ofShanghai, Ke Qingshi, was known to follow Mao’s ideas closely andMao therefore wanted to promote him to the powerful Politburo. ButLiu Shaoqi opposed Ke’s promotion, on the basis that Ke had objectedto Liu’s push in the 1940s for everyone to take Mao as the central leaderof the CCP. Mao then asked Ke to talk to Liu and persuade him toforget about that incident (Wang Li 2001: 755).

Fairy tale and how scholarship changes

It is incredible how unreflecting and how shameless modern showbusiness can be. As Heartfield (2005) points out, it was Chang, in WildSwans, the best-ever-selling family memoirs, who tells us that ChiangKai-shek had adopted a policy of non-resistance in the face of theJapanese seizure of Manchuria and Japan’s increasing encroachmentson China proper. Chang also claims that it was Chiang who, instead ofmobilizing forces to fight the Japanese invasion, had concentrated ontrying to annihilate the Communists. But in many instances, The


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Unknown Story flatly contradicts Wild Swans. In The Unknown Story,Mao is claimed to have engineered Chiang’s abduction by his owngeneral Zhang Xueliang in 1936. But if you read Wild Swans Chiangwas ‘partly saved by the Communists’. If The Unknown Story isintended to correct the claims made in Wild Swans for the sake of its 10million readers then Chang should have indicated these correctionseither in text or footnotes, Heartfield rightly points out.

Chang’s co-author Halliday says that being married to Chang is likea fairy tale (Thorpe 2005). In his non-fairy tale days Hallidaycondemned the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China (Halliday1973). But now he agrees with his fairy tale princess that the Japanesewar in China was more or less the result of a Mao/Stalin conspiracy.How does Halliday compare Chang’s and his interpretation of theKorean War now with that in his own book Korea: The Unknown War, orhis understanding of the Cultural Revolution now with his previousinterpretation that the riots in 1967 in Hong Kong were ‘anti-colonial’and were against an administration where there ‘is no democracy’(Halliday 1974)? In those days he wrote about the British colonialoppression in China and Hong Kong; now Halliday goes along withhis princess and blames the bloody repression in Hong Kong in 1967on provocation by Mao. The Korean War (1950–53) is largely blamedon Mao, whereas in his earlier book he stressed the role of Truman aswarmonger (Williems 2005).

How times change. So does scholarship.

Does it matter?

What is surprising, or not surprising, is that very few take the troubleto question the methodological flaws in the book. An exception isPhillip Short, whose own biography of Mao was published in 1999.Short says that Chang and Halliday have reduced Mao from a complexhistorical character to a one-dimensional ‘cardboard cut out of Satan’,and yet almost no reviewers really think that this is a problem. Thecase of Kristof is a good example. On the one hand, Kristof tells us that:

One of those listed as a source is Zhang Hanzhi, Mao’s Englishteacher and close associate; she’s also one of my oldest Chinesefriends, so I checked with her. Zhang Hanzhi said that she hadindeed met informally with Chang two or three times but haddeclined to be interviewed and never said anything substantial.

Moreover, Kristof complains that in the book, ‘Mao comes across assuch a villain that he never really becomes three-dimensional,’ and thathe is ‘presented as such a bumbling psychopath that it’s hard to


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comprehend how he bested all his rivals to lead China and emerge asone of the most worshipped figures in history’. Nevertheless, Kristofstill declares ‘this is a magisterial work’ (Kristof 2005). Professor PerryLink of Princeton and one of the editors of the Tiananmen Papers, whilefeeling compelled to say something about the book’s methodology, hasa largely positive review of it (Link 2005b).

The academic community in general seems critical of the book, asseen in a special issue of the China Journal (2006), whereas the mediaseems to be generally positive. The function of the media is discussedfurther in later chapters, but it suffices to say here that it will takeyears, if ever, to deconstruct the Chang and Halliday ‘truth’ promotedby the media. I totally agree with Thomas Bernstein (2005) who thinksthat ‘the book is a major disaster for the contemporary China field.’‘Because of its stupendous research apparatus, its claims will beaccepted widely.’

It does not matter so long as the politics is right

To demonize Mao is the right politics of course. When someone pastedsome criticism of the Chang and Halliday book on the Amazon saleswebsite, it was immediately attacked as ‘ugly Chinese propaganda’(Jin Xiaoding 2005). On the other hand, Jin’s critique of the book wasmet with absolute silence by the Western media (no Western mediaoutlet was ready to publish the 17 questions raised by Jin). When theChinese version of Jin’s critique appeared on the Chinese languagewebsite duowei (http://blog.chinesenewsnet.com), there was a livelydebate. Jung Chang had to admit, when asked, that Jin’s 17 questionsare good questions but refused to provide convincing replies to them.For the Western media it does not matter as long as the politics is right,and the right politics is that Mao must be discredited. In the nextchapter I will consider why.


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5 Mao: the known story andthe logic of denial

Introduction: Mao the known story, a general outline

In the previous chapter I showed in detail how Mao: The Unknown Storyby Jung Chang and Jon Halliday cannot be taken as an authoritative,scholarly work. The fact that the book has been taken as serious scholar-ship by the popular media is an intellectual scandal. I have indicated thatit should be read as a politically motivated piece of show business aimedat discrediting Chinese revolutionary ideas and practices. In this chap-ter I will focus on what we do know about the Mao era to show that thereis already a known story that cannot be untold by clever tricks.

The Unknown Story is supposed to be a biography of Mao, a leaderof a party that transformed the landscape of China and beyond, whoseideas and sayings still have an impact around much of the world.However, apart from devoting a few pages to an article that Mao wrotewhen he was in his early twenties Chang and Halliday in general donot talk about his ideas and policies in relation to his written work orspeeches.

There is a known story, a story that cannot be wiped out even ifMao’s body was thrown out of the mausoleum on the Tian’anmenSquare and his portrait was stripped from the Heavenly Gate of theTian’anmen rostrum. The story is this: the Chinese people made a revo-lution led by the CCP, the most important leader of which was Mao, arevolution in which Chang’s parents participated, a revolution fromwhich Chang herself benefited. It was due to this revolution that theaverage life expectancy of the majority Chinese rose from 35 in 1949 to63 by 1975 (Bergaglio 2006) in a space of less than 30 years. It was arevolution that brought unity and stability to a country that had beenplagued by civil wars and foreign invasions, and a revolution that laidthe foundation for China to become the equal of the great globalpowers. It was a revolution that carried out land reform, promotedwomen’s status, improved popular literacy, and eventually trans-formed Chinese society beyond recognition (Selden et al 1991, Selden,1971, Selden and Eggleston 1979, Selden 1988).

The known story of Mao who led a revolution that transformedhuman life of such significance and magnitude cannot be dismissed bya few sensational claims. What were the historical circumstances thatwere the context of such a transformation? Could social change on

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such a scale take place simply as a result of a few power-struggleconspiracies and personal plots and schemes? What were the guidingideas and social and economic practices involved? What were the poli-cies? What did millions and millions of Chinese do and think? Whatwere the values and beliefs during these years? What institutionalchanges were carried out and why? The known story is full of answersand explanations, as well as unanswered ones. Any attempt to removethe known story from history should involve engagement with theexisting literature, so as to dispute or confirm what is already knownor can be known. But the co-authors of The Unknown Story do not dothis. As shown in Chapter 4 they do not even engage with their ownwritings that have been published.

Evidence of the known story

In order to tell their unknown story Chang and Halliday have to ignorethe known story. For instance, Mao is accused of callousness and of notcaring about starving peasants during the hard years after the GreatLeap Forward. But the known story supported by documentaryevidence is that Mao did care. Apart from his personal decision not toeat pork – a favourite food item for the Chinese and for Mao himself(Quan Yanchi 1989) – Mao tried very hard to make policy changes torectify the situation. What I present below is the kind of evidence in theknown story that The Unknown Story ignores.

A letter

On 31 October 1960 Zhou Enlai sent a policy letter addressing the issueof the collective system for Mao to approve. The policy letter titled Duizhongyang guanyu renmin gongshe dangqian zhengce wenti de jinji zhishixin (An urgent letter of instruction by the CCP Central Committeeconcerning the current policy problems of rural people’s communes)was aimed at correcting some policies and practices that had beenproved to be detrimental to production and livelihoods during theGreat Leap Forward. Mao not only approved the letter but also madeextensive comments and corrections to make the letter more effectiveand more ‘right wing’. I will give a brief analysis of these comments incomparison with the original wording.

The original letter had twelve points to which Mao made sixcomments. The first comment is that the letter should be sent to thevillages by telegram instead of ordinary post so that it would reach thegrassroots quicker. In the first point the original letter stated that thesystem of using the production team as the basic accounting unit wasfundamental and therefore should be maintained. This was to counter


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the practice of big communes involving several villages in whichabsolute equality was the norm and in which labour supervision couldnot be adequately implemented. By making smaller-scale productionteams the accounting unit, involving only a dozen households, thesystem would allow diversity and differentiated distribution amongdifferent villages and would make supervision of labour easier. To thispoint Mao added that the system of production teams as the basicaccounting unit should not be changed for at least seven years (in factthe system lasted until the early 1980s). This change by Mao wasintended to give the grassroots a sense of stability and certainty.

In point seven the original letter stipulated that 70 per cent of theproduce should be distributed as salary and only 30 per cent in theform of equal supply. Mao commented that the collective systemshould not be state owned but collectively owned, and therefore‘salary’ was not the right word and that distribution should be ‘to eachaccording to one’s labour’, not ‘to each according to one’s needs’. Maoalso inserted, as his fourth comment, that the principle of ‘to eachaccording to one’s labour’ should not be changed for at least 20 years.Mao further stressed that the CCP should be whole-heartedly (yi xin yiyi) devoted to production and that this letter should be read by partyofficials at every level three times. Mao also changed the sentence‘Commune members should be allowed to raise pigs themselves’ in theoriginal document into ‘Commune members should be encouraged toraise pigs for themselves’ (my emphasis).

Referring to the percentage of income to be kept in the communecoffers for public goods and services rather than distributed directly tothe commune members, the original letter stipulated a level of 10 percent. However, Mao wanted more to be distributed and less to bereserved and therefore changed this to 5 per cent. In the original letterit was stated that in poor communes or areas that had suffered adecline of production the percentage to be reserved can be even loweror none at all; Mao changed ‘can be’ into ‘ought to be’.

The letter, revised according to Mao’s comments, was sent out onthat very day. This is only one example to show that if one cares toexamine documentary records there is evidence for a known butdifferent story, a story shows that Mao, did care about production andthe livelihood of the farmers and was more ‘right wing’ than some ofhis comrades

Other documentary evidence

In fact as early as 29 April 1959, Mao (1959) wrote a letter to address sixcrucial issues about food, grain production and the truthful reporting ofproduction outputs, all stressing moderation and calling for cooling down

M A O: T H E K N O W N S TO RY

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the Great Leap hype. By doing this Mao confessed that he was a conser-vative (baoshou zhuyizhe). In order to make sure that his letter reached thegrassroots Mao took an unprecedented step by addressing it to six levelsof government officials: from provincial leaders to district, county,commune and production brigade, right down to production team lead-ers in villages. Mao was obviously afraid the party bureaucracies at higherlevel might not pass on the instruction to the grassroots. In this letter hestressed to his audience that the responsibility system (bao chan), which bythe way was similar to the so-called reform by the post-Mao authorities,must definitely be implemented regardless of any other instructions fromhigher authorities. Mao also pointed out that for the next ten years at leastcaution had to be taken so as not to boast about grain production, and thatany boastful unrealistic rhetoric (dahua, gaodiao) would be dangerous(weixian) because for such a big country food is the number one priority(chifan shi diyi jian dashi) as shortage of food was no small matter.

Again during early April 1959, Mao at a Shanghai Politburo meetingcriticized the zealots at the Central Planning Commission and praisedChen Yun for his cool headedness. Mao wanted the steel and ironproduction quotas to go down, as suggested by Chen Yun (Yang Bo2006). In fact as early as 1958 Mao warned the CCP leaders not toreport false achievements (Wu Lengxi 1995). According to evidencepublished on 7 September 2007 in Luoyang ribao (The Luoyang Daily),it was Mao who during the Zhengzhou Conference in March 1959decided to cool down the Great Leap hype, against the prevailing trendat that time, after he met a village leader Li Changwu on 8 March 1959and listened to what he had to say (Long Pan 2007).

So what was the problem?

The two letters and other documentary evidence clearly show thatthere were other CCP leaders at various levels that were so irrationalthat Mao had to restrain them or to bypass them. They also show thatthe Great Leap Forward was a genuine policy mistake and that Maowas not the only person who was responsible. However, ever since thepost-Mao reforms Chinese historiography has been attempting toplace the blame on Mao alone. It became inconvenient to expose thosewho acted more recklessly than Mao but were rehabilitated after hisdeath. Li Jie, one of the main writers of the four volume Mao Zedongzhuan 1949–1976 (A Biography of Mao 1949–1976) published in 2004,said that it was difficult to write the Mao biography, but not becausethere were things about Mao that could not be published. Rather, itwas mainly because there were things about other leaders, especiallythose who were in the good book of official history, that were notallowed to be said (Nong Nuji 2006a).


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Mao of course should bear the primary responsibility for the GreatLeap famine; but other Chinese leaders such as Deng Xiaoping (as Ihave discussed elsewhere in this book) were also responsible, and LiuShaoqi was one of them. Liu at least on one occasion in 1958 eventalked about forming a commune as big as a county, and about revolu-tionizing families by having husbands and wives living in differentdormitories (Qiong 2007). On 19 September 1958, when told by a localleader in Jiangsu that one mu of land could produce ten thousand jinof rice, Liu wondered whether more was possible and suggestedploughing the soil deeper to produce more (Qiong 2007).1 In hismemoirs, Wu Lengxi, the then editor of the People’s Daily, rememberedthat Mao time and again urged him to be cautious in reporting so asnot to mislead the party and the public. Wu (1995) confesses that hemade mistakes by not having really understood what Mao meant andwhat the consequences were. Wu says that at the height of the GreatLeap hype Mao was in the minority who warned caution whereas hehimself followed the majority, which included Liu Shaoqi (Wu Lengxi1995).

The famine death toll

The Great Leap Forward has to be the most disastrous period of theMao era for rural Chinese. However, for Chang and Halliday to pickthe highest number of estimates of famine death and to state that Maohad murdered these people is sensationalism beyond the commonsense of decency. There are a number of points here in relation to thefamine death toll. Scholars have made different estimates, rangingfrom 10 to 30 million deaths. These are estimates for many reasons.One is that there were no reliable demographic censuses to makepossible an accurate figure. Second, it is hard to know whether somecasualties during the Great Leap Forward were deaths by hunger orpremature deaths due to hardship. Third, some estimates try to assessthe ‘missing’ population on the basis of normal death and birth ratesand therefore may have included millions of those who might not havebeen born. In the words of Patnaik:

Some scholars have used a very dubious method of arriving atgrossly unrealistic and inflated ‘famine deaths’ during thisperiod (1959–61) by taking account not only of the higher crudedeath rate (which is a legitimate measure) but also counting the‘missing millions’ as a result of the lower birth rate, as part ofthe toll. There is a great deal of difference between people whoare already there, dying prematurely due to a sharp decline innutritional status, and people not being born at all. The former


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can enter the statistics of famine deaths according to anysensible definition of famine, but people who are not born at allare obviously in no position to die whether prematurely orotherwise.

(Patnaik 2004)

Fourth, nowadays natural disasters such as floods and droughts are notconsidered a factor for the famine during the period. But in Barmé (2007)an eyewitness account testifies that in 1960 there was the worst flooddisaster in century in his area and ‘The water came right up to our kang.… The hunger was too great. It was hell. The natural disasters added tothe effect, and that’s the truth.’

If Chang and Halliday’s 38 million toll is correct that means one intwenty Chinese died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward,something that could not be hidden away no matter how hard theauthorities tried. It is also worth noting that in the village case studiesthat I know of, no death toll due to famine during the Great LeapForward is reported. These studies include Gao 1999a, Seybolt 1996,Endicott (1989) and Hinton (1983). The two villages studied by Seyboltand Endicott were in two of the worst-hit provinces, Sichuan and Henan.

The final point related to the famine issue is the nature of responsi-bility. Mao should certainly be held primarily responsible for theconsequences of the Great Leap Forward. First he should be heldresponsible for initiating the movement by criticizing Zhou Enlai,Deng Zihui and other more cautious leaders before the Great LeapForward started. Second Mao was mainly responsible for the quickand dramatic collectivization around the winter of 1957 and spring of1958. The sudden change of organization from co-ops to big collectivecommunes meant that no adequate supervision and monitoringsystem could be implemented to manage grain production. This orga-nizational failure undoubtedly had detrimental consequences in grainproduction. Eventually there was a food shortage everywhere in Chinaand disastrous famine in some areas. But to identify Mao as the personresponsible for a policy disaster is not the same as to say Mao was themurderer of so many people. Who is supposed to be the murderer ofthe millions of Russians whose life expectancy has been shortened byten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

From this perspective, it can be convincingly argued that the GreatLeap Forward was a disastrously failed trial of a different model ofdevelopment that embraced local enterprise and decentralizedindustry, a work force that could be both industrial and agricultural,and a community that was not solely urban or rural. In fact, some ofthese ideas were followed up during the late 1960s and early 1970swhen township and village enterprises that had started during the


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Great Leap Forward were encouraged to consolidate and developfurther. The issue of how to make the rural population part of an inte-grated development still faces China today. According to Wen (2005),even with the present rapid rate of industrialization and urbanizationthere will still be 800 million people living in rural China by 2050.Therefore, I would like to argue that the Great Leap Forward idea wasnot some kind of madness, but theoretically guided rationality.

The economy in the Mao era

There is plenty of evidence that supports the known story in whichhundreds of millions of people were affected positively. The increaseof life expectancy in the era of Mao alone, in the words of Williems(2005), has given an estimated 35 billion extra collective years of lifeto the Chinese people. Though living standards remained low, andwere for many at subsistence level, it is plain truth that except for theGreat Leap Forward Years of 1959 and 1960 and the Cultural Revolu-tion years of 1967 and 1968, Chinese economic growth was not onlysteady but also outpaced most developing countries. By 1976 Chinahad laid down a sound industrial and agricultural base for aneconomic take off. These facts are proven and accepted by bothChinese and Western scholars in their macro studies (Meisner 1986,Lardy 1978, Rawski 1993, Chow 1985, Perkins 1985, and Field 1986)as well as micro case studies (Forster 2003, Bramall 1993 and Endicott1989). Even the Chinese official statistics released by the post-Maoauthorities who shout loud anti-Mao rhetoric of economic calamitiescannot deny these facts.

One should be cautious in quoting claims by the post-Mao Chineseauthorities that intend to denigrate the Mao era, so as not to fall intothe trap that ‘it must be true since the Chinese themselves say so’. Theinstinct that ‘the Chinese would not say things bad about themselvesunless they were true’ does not work all the time. Foster’s case studyof Zhejiang is a good example to illustrate this point. The post-Maoauthorities and elite intelligentsia in Zhejiang province condemn theCultural Revolution by stating in the literature that the it caused ‘gravelosses to economic construction’ and that: ‘the leftist policies causedthe gross output of agriculture over four successive years (1968–71) tobe lower than the that of 1967.’ But if one looks into the details onefinds that ‘Zhejiang experienced double-digit rise over the followingfive years from 1969 to 1973. These were of the impressive magnitudeof 19.2 per cent, 16.2 per cent, 15.4 per cent, 10.2 per cent and 11.5 percent’ (Forster 2003: 147). The Cultural Revolution did not ‘cause thedisaster to the provincial economy’ and there was ‘a rapid growth ofrural industry’ (Forster 2003: 148).


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In 1966 the proportion of industrial output value from collectiveand commune/brigade run industrial enterprises to state enter-prises was 17:83; in 1976 it was 37:63, with the output value ofcollective industry growing at the annual average rate of 15.8per cent over the 10 years.

(Forster 2003: 148)

Forster’s research shows that during the period, the tea industry inZhejiang province grew rapidly.

The yardstick of Hitler: a favourite European comparison

Instead of discussing Mao, a political figure of such consequence, inthe context of political, social and economic importance, Chang andHalliday focus on character assassination. Of course one can write abiography that focuses on personality, on private life and privatethoughts. Such a biography may indeed bring insights and under-standing that cannot be found in biographies of a non-personal nature.However, this cannot be achieved with the single-minded intention ofpersonality attack. One needs to reveal the personality’s inner tensionand conflicts. We need to see the complexities, paradoxes, ironies andtragedies, in other words, the unintended consequences of human life,individually or collectively.

The development of a complex character is applicable to all goodbiographies. In the particular case of Mao there is another dimensionto his character. That is, the personality of Mao has to be examined inthe context of Chinese history, tradition and culture. Any decontextu-alized comparison of Mao with a European figure is intellectuallyinfantile if not politically motivated. In The Unknown Story and else-where, such as in the media reviews of the book, we are constantlyurged to compare Mao with Hitler.2 However, in my understanding,Hitler and Mao belonged to completely different worlds. Mao becamea leader in the long process of a popular revolution that transformedthe political, social and economic landscape of a large country whereasHitler was the leader of a regime that invaded other countries for nounderstandable reasons other than the desire for conquest. Hitler wasthe leader of a regime that designed scientific means and methods tophysically wipe out other ethnic groups. Hitler and Mao worked forvery different causes and were utterly different personalities.

If they read what Hitler said, saw the way he made speeches, knewwhat he did, most, if not all, Chinese – this is an educated guess sincethere is, to the best of my knowledge, no scientifically designed surveyon this – could not help but come to the straightforward conclusionthat this person must be clinically insane. Quite simply, a personality


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like Hitler would never have risen to prominence in politics in Chinesesociety. He would have been a laughing stock and treated with uttercontempt and disdain. On the other hand, Mao was viewed then andstill today by many in China (here ‘many’ really means many) as aphilosopher, a thinker, a military strategist, a revolutionary statesman.The idea that Hitler had charisma never stops baffling and puzzlingme. In fact there is no proper term in Chinese to translate ‘charisma’,but Weberian charismatic leadership features prominently in the polit-ical theory of Western tradition (Wang Shaoquang 1995). This onlyshows how dangerously misleading it can be to use the lens of Westerntheoretical concepts to approach Chinese phenomena.

Of course Chang, and others, would say that the Chinese people arestill under thought control, are still brainwashed and therefore cannotsee what she sees, as she keeps on telling journalists who run to her likea flock of sheep. Despite a lot of anti-communist cold war rhetoric inthe literature I have not seen any well-researched evidence to supportthe judgement that so many Chinese still refuse to hate Mao simplybecause they are brainwashed. Incidentally, the fact that this contemp-tuous elitist attitude towards the masses of Chinese people isconceptually contradictory to the very value of democracy and ofhuman rights is hardly noticed.

If these supposedly benighted Chinese were to be given many yearsof education including several years’ studies in countries like the UK andthen allowed to settle down in one of those Western countries –better stillif they were to marry an Englishman, as Chang did and can afford amiddle-class modern Western life style – then it is very plausible thatthey too will be ‘de-brainwashed’, and awaken to hate Mao. Imaginehow Marx (and possibly Mao) would laugh in his grave: it is after all,material circumstances that condition the human consciousness.

Mao’s personality: the known story

In the simple, black and white caricature in The Unknown Story, Mao isportrayed as a callous monster with no feelings even for his ownfamily. However, what is known in the literature tells a different storyand Chang and Halliday have not taken the trouble to look at that,though they are supposed to have interviewed this and that personand consulted so many documents in Chinese. In his memoirs Mao’sbodyguard Li Yinqiao described how during the famine year of 1960one of Mao’s daughters, Li Na, came home from boarding school tohave dinner after three weeks’ absence. The cook and her mother JiangQing made some arrangements so that the dinner for the whole familywas special. When the meal started, Li Na was so hungry and ate sofast that both Mao and Jiang Qing stopped eating. Eventually Li Na


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finished all and everything on the dinner table. Both the cook and JiangQing were sobbing and Mao was so moved by the whole matter thathe stood up and walked first into his bedroom and then back out to thecourtyard, totally lost, not knowing what to do.

Chang and Halliday, like many in the West, would argue that weshould not trust accounts like this since this was officially published inChina. One should not forget that though the Chinese authorities donot allow any personal attack against past CCP leaders – a very decentattitude one would think – most of the information we know aboutChina, including information condemning Mao, is found in Chineseofficial publications. In any case what motive would Li Yinqiao have totell lies about such details of daily life? We know that Liu Shaoqi is offi-cially rehabilitated as a victim of Mao’s wrongdoing. It is thereforeofficially politically correct and rewarding to say good things aboutLiu. However any observant researcher of the literature in Chinesecannot fail to notice that hardly any personal memoirs by Liu’s formerbodyguards or those who had served him or worked with him havemuch to say about Liu that is personally warm.

The logic of denial of the known story

The Taiwanese publisher Yuanliu had contracted to publish theChinese version of The Unknown Story, but abandoned the project afterit became clear that the authors could not factually back up at leastsome of their claims. Especially controversial for the Taiwanesepublisher is the claim that one of the KMT’s most prominent generals,Hu Zongnan, was a CCP agent. Descendants of Hu demanded that thepublisher delete such a claim or they would face a lawsuit. For Changand Halliday, it is important for such claims to be kept in the book. Thebook sets to prove that two known stories are not true. One knownstory is that the CCP triumphed over the KMT because, among otherfactors, the CCP leader Mao was an excellent military strategist. Butthe book wants to prove that Mao was a monstrous murderer as wellas a useless military leader. The second known story is that the KMTwas defeated because it was led by a corrupted dynasty of the fourpowerful families (Seagrave 1986) and because it had no socioeco-nomic programmes that could win over the majority of the Chinese inrural China. But Chang and Halliday do not want anything to do withsocial and societal forces in the story. How can you explain the successof the CCP led by Mao when a largely peasant army fought at hugeodds against the modern KMT army, supported by the most advancedand powerful force in the world, the United States? To overturn thetwo known stories, Chang and Halliday have to say that China wasdelivered to Mao by agents such as Hu Zongnan.


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The Chinese version of The Unknown Story appeared eventually,thanks to the Kaifang magazine in Hong Kong, one of those anti-communist popular publications that constantly spread rumoursabout mainland China. The book of course has to be published for itsusefulness in sustaining anti-communism.

Let me give one example of many of how Chang and Halliday can berather loose with the truth. In order to inform the reader about the evil ofthe Chinese communist regime Chang (2006a) claims that when she wassent by the Chinese government to study in the UK she had to be accom-panied by another student whenever she went out or else she would besent back to China. She also claims that she was probably the first studentfrom mainland China to enter a public bar and the first to go out alone.

In fact that the Chinese government sent students to study in theUK as early as 1972. I myself went to the UK as student before Changin 1977, along with 17 others. The Chinese embassy did advise us thatwe should go out at least in pairs for reasons of safety. But we werenever told that if we ventured out alone we would be sent back toChina. In the beginning we went in groups to classes and out to partiesor shopping. But after a while when we got used to our new environ-ment, we would go out alone whenever we wanted. We visited barsand sometimes went alone to the red light district in Soho. I even dateda local girl. Two of us even took a tour trip from the UK to the UnitedStates. None of us was sent back to China.

Academic reception

One would assume that by the commonly accepted standard of schol-arship The Unknown Story should be dismissed immediately. We allknow that if the methods are not sound the resulting conclusionsshould be treated with suspicion. It is true that even in natural scienceresearchers tend to start with presumptions and assumptions. We alltend to seek evidence to prove our conceptualizations or model ofexplanation. However, we also know that if a scientist or a scholar or awriter distorts evidence deliberately or knowingly the work should becondemned as a fraud.

The academic community did launch a serious effort to review thebook in the China Journal. Benton and Tsang in their review criticizedChang and Halliday’s ‘flawed assertions’, for the fact that they ‘misreadsources’, ‘use them selectively’ and ‘out of context’ (Benton and Tsang2005: 95). Benton and Tsang have repudiated ten major claims made inthe book one by one. Timothy Cheek thinks the book is ‘a great waste ofeffort’, and the book’s ‘TV soap opera-”Dallas” (with Mao as “JR”)’,offers ‘very little that is new’. To Cheek, ‘It is propaganda’ (Cheek 2005:110). As Barmé rightly points out, Chang and Halliday’s telling of history


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has a ‘callousness’ and ‘evokes the image of Oriental obliquity’ (Barmé2005: 138). Chan (2006), in his coup d’œil review, shows unequivocallythat Chang and Halliday’s so-called ‘New information is manufacturedout of a manipulation of facts to such an extreme that they can no longerbe sustained by empirical evidence,’ and that the co-authors ‘prioritizeentertainment, sensationalism and titillation over historical accuracy’.

On one occasion, responding to the scholarly criticism, Changclaims, correctly, that 90 per cent of the reviews of their book are posi-tive and that the reason why some academics are critical is that theyhave to be critical in order to save face, or they would have to admitthat they have got it all wrong (Chang 2006b). Right or wrong, by theend of 2006, The Unknown Story has already been translated into twelvelanguages and 13 more language versions are being translated. Thebook is on the bestseller list in every language version that has beentranslated so far (Chang 2006b).

One has to wonder why The Unknown Story is so highly acclaimed.Even the supposedly left-wing or progressive (whatever that meansthese days) British flagship paper the Guardian takes the book tremen-dously seriously. Perhaps a self-proclaimed serious paper also has tofashion some market. ‘Together, however, they [Chang and Halliday]make a formidable literary partnership, a yin and yang of exoticglamour and scholarly erudition’ declares the Guardian (2005). AWestern yang and a Chinese yin together are really exotic, a fairy taleof glamour. But scholarly erudition? You must be joking.

It is obvious that in writing her biography of Mao, Chang starts withan attitude, an attitude of hatred and therefore the desire to bringdown Mao’s personality in the scale of history. This can be achievedand all indications are that Chang already has. People, educated orotherwise (and who would want to be told that they are not educated),like ready-made and easily consumable commodities. Here is one.

Revolution: from farewell to burial

As we saw in Chapter 2, the ‘forward-looking’ neo-EnlightenmentChinese intelligentsia bid their farewell to revolution only a few yearsafter its foremost leader, Mao, died in 1976. By the early 1990s the intel-lectual climate internationally was such that a farewell was seen as notintellectually rigorous enough. Revolutionary ideas and practices notonly had to be dead but also nailed into the coffin under our feet. Therewas the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thecommunist party in Russia was dismantled under Yeltsin. Even symbolsof revolution had to be dismantled. In the Soviet Union the 7 and 8 ofNovember were public holidays to celebrate the October Revolution in1917. In 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the holiday was


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shortened from two days to one. Then in 1996, the name of the holidaywas changed to the ‘day of harmony and understanding’ (a rough trans-lation). In 2004 under Putin the holiday was again changed by shiftingits date to 4 November and it is called something like ‘People Unity Day’(Zhang Jie 2007).

Time magazine confidently declares that if they (the brainwashedpublic?) ever get to read Chang’s ‘atom bomb of a book’, it will curethem of Mao admiration. ‘Chang and Halliday have plunged a daggerdeep into the heart of the Mao legend, so deep it is hard to imagineanything like a full recovery’, declares another reviewer (French 2005).That explains why an intellectual scandal is not treated as such. Yes,Mao has to be brought down. To have the portrait of Mao on theTian’anmen rostrum is offensive to all the cold-war knights, laterconverted or not. Without a complete uprooting of the CCP in China itis not yet the End of History. That is why, in spite of some acknowl-edgements that Jung Chang’s historiography is faulty, almost allmainstream reviewers nevertheless feel compelled to kowtow to thetheory that Mao indeed was a mass murderer (Williems 2005)

In this global climate of liberal democracy and neoconservativemarket capitalism triumph, the fall of the Berlin Wall is not enough todraw the final curtain. The Chinese still stubbornly remain ‘commu-nist’ by refusing to dig Mao’s grave. Therefore, the Great Wall of Chinais still to be brought down so as to bury revolution permanently. It ishere that we can see the significance of and connection with the waythe French Revolution is evaluated.

Furet and the French Revolution

Inspired by Furet’s work, Simon Schama (1989) suggests that the terror-ist zeal of the French Revolution created the political and ideologicalprecedents of the twentieth century totalitarian regimes and even of theHolocaust. Furet’s basic argument is that there was not much socioeco-nomic basis for the French Revolution, as the Marxist tradition wouldhave argued. Instead, the French Revolution took place largely becauseof a political discourse, a popular Rousseauianism that was prevalent onthe eve of 1789, which, according to Furet, was dangerously illiberal andtherefore the cause of the Terror and violence following the French Revo-lution. Furet’s criticism of absolutism, and especially his battle cry forindividualism, could not have come at a better time than during the1980s when Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was no society butfamilies and when Soviet Union was about to collapse.

In the Furet and Ozouf’s Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution(1989), which was a publication phenomenon, ‘missing are virtually allthe major social groups that contributed to ... its felt effects; the nobility,


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clergy, bourgeoisie, peasants, artisans, and women’ (Berenson 1995: 96).This was ‘not history from the bottom up, no concern with everyday lifeand popular culture, and nothing about the production of grain, subsis-tence crisis, or the economy in general, save for some brief entries ontaxes, assignats, and nationalized land.’ ‘In the effort to break with theMarxist social interpretation, Furet and others have created a history withthe society, economy, and popular culture left out’ (Berenson 1995: 96).

But all these do not matter. Furet and others like him were in linewith the intellectual trend and they therefore drew unusual mediaattention. The French media crowned Furet in 1989 ‘the King of theBicentennial’ (Berenson 1995: 96) and American publishers brought outhis books immediately after they appeared in French.

In this global intellectual climate, the Chinese revolution cannot betolerated. The foremost leader of this revolution Mao is a symbol, ametaphor, a battle cry of an alternative set of values that is still threat-ening, or at least offensive, to the capitalist domination of the globe.Now we are inundated with arguments and comments by China’s‘neoliberal dynasty’ (Kwong 2006) that the spread of liberal marketcapitalism is not only good for the Chinese but also for humanity;burial of revolution is the watchword.

In any case, one can afford to bury the revolution after it has doneits job.

Is revolution inevitable?

Revolution in human history is not the manifestation of a design bysomeone, Deity or human, but a process in which some events, thoughnot necessary, become inevitable at a certain point whether one likes itor not. Collective actions take place under certain circumstances inspite of any particular person’s wish. In an insightful socioeconomicecological study of Huaibei peasant rebellions Perry argues thatpeasant insurrection is a ‘sustained, structured, and sensible form ofcollective action’ (Perry 1980: 2) and that ‘under conditions of scarcity,violence against fellow competitors is often a rational strategy’ and‘Denial of essentials to others is seen as contributing directly to one’sown chances for survival’ (Perry 1980: 3). In other words, persistentworsening of socioeconomic conditions will lead to violent collectiveactions. The difference between rebellion and revolution is whetherthese actions are guided by a politico-socioeconomic programme.

At least two revolutions in modern China are events of suchinevitability, the Republic Revolution of 1911 and the Communist Revo-lution of 1949. The process that fermented the Chinese CommunistRevolution ran for a long time. According to the London-educatedanthropologist and sociologist Fei Xiaotong (1987 and 1992), traditional


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China had a well-developed industry, which was not concentrated inurban cities but dispersed in rural areas. It was this rural industrycombined with agriculture that structured Chinese society in which thelandlord class and urban commercialization were supported. It was thisstructure that enabled a rental class to collect a high rate of land tax fromthe peasantry because incomes from rural industry helped sustain theirlivelihoods. However, when Western industrial goods penetrated theChinese market, the consequences were disastrous because the collapseof rural industry meant it became impossible for the peasantry to makea living. Fei here only talks about normal capitalist trade penetration intoChina’s interior. He was not even talking about colonial plunder and theopium trade, for the defence of which the British launched a war. There-fore, Fei argues, conditions were ripe for a peasant revolution. The solu-tion was not only land reform but also income from sources other thanland, for land was not enough to support the Chinese population. Bothsolutions required the re-structuring of the Chinese society.

Today, with hindsight when the job of re-structuring Chinese societyhas been accomplished, amid the triumph of liberal democracy andmarket capitalism, revolutionary solutions are seen not only as excessivebut as senseless destruction. Regarding the issue of land reform in China,He Zhiguang (2007), in a publication that appeared in the ChineseCommunist Party official historical journal Yanhuang chunqiu, assertsthat during the 1950 land reform Mao overturned Liu Shaoqi’s peacefulreform and declares that Mao’s intervention was the first step to pushback the wheel of history in new China, because the land reform carriedout the barbaric violence of class struggle. Mao’s policy of land reformwas the first step in developing an anti-democracy, anti-humanity andanti-science ultra-leftism, He asserts.

An alternative model of development

Ultimately the issue of evaluating contemporary China comes to themodel for modernity. According to mainstream economic history andthe history of ideas, large-scale industrialization and urbanization notonly embody the best model but an inevitable and a progressive one.Underlying this teleological view there is an assumption of a binarydichotomy: tradition versus modernity, rural versus urban, agricultureversus industry, handicraft versus large-scale industry, organic versusmechanical, status versus contracts, rule versus bureaucracy, water-mill versus steam, advanced versus backward and so on. Taking thisassumption for granted and given the empirical and daily-lifeevidence of the superiority of the Western model of liberal democracyand market capitalism the preferred development model seemsobvious.


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But is it? Could there be other models that not only make the planetearth sustainable but also create new subjectivity? Do the ideas of Maogive us some direction for that? Badiou certainly thinks so. Badiou(2006) thinks that the Cultural Revolution was an attempt, albeit afailed one, to create new subjectivity. Why is it then that the CulturalRevolution has been seen as only violent and destructive? The logic ofburying the revolution requires a narrative that highlights the violentand destructive aspects of popular revolutions. As pointed out byWang Shaoguang (2006), the current literature focuses on the destruc-tive part of the Cultural Revolution but pays little attention to itsconstructive part. The destruction mainly occurred at the beginning ofthe Cultural Revolution, in the years 1966 and 1967, and to some extenteven in 1968, but the constructive period lasted from 1967 onwardsuntil 1976. The logic of burying the revolution requires a narrative thatdenies the constructive aspects of populist revolutions.


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6 How a medical doctordoctors history: a case studyof Li Zhisui

Introduction: expatriate Chinese memories – a literary phenomenon

As a source for the interpretation and understanding of China’scontemporary politics and society in general and of the ChineseCultural Revolution in particular, memoirs and biographies written bythe Chinese themselves have drawn increasing attention from Westernacademics.1 The impact that Nien Cheng (1987) Yuan Ming (1994), LiZhisui (1994) and Jung Chang (1991) have had in the West clearlydemonstrates the importance of this genre. One of the most compre-hensive monographs on the Cultural Revolution in English, by BarbaraBarnouin and Yu Changgen (1993), relies heavily on the memoir andbiography literature and claims to have corrected a few Westernmisperceptions of the Cultural Revolution.

Doctor Li Zhisui’s memoirs have created a stir in the West. Even therespectable academic journal, The China Journal (formerly called TheAustralian Journal of Chinese Affairs) invited Anne Thurston, DavidBachman, Lucian Pye and Geremie Barmé for a special discussion ofLi’s book in its No. 35 (January) 1996 issue. As for Jung Chang’s WildSwans, its popularity is phenomenal. It sold more than 5 million copiesworldwide in more than two dozen languages and became the ‘biggestgrossing non-fiction paperback in publication history’ (Kong Shuyu1997). Many schools and universities use the book as a textbook ofmodern China. But greater impact does not necessarily mean betterunderstanding. As one personal friend, Cathy Farnworth, who learnedChinese and worked in China commented, someone who did notknow anything about China would hate the country after readingChang’s book.

Writings by those Chinese outside China who were participantsin contemporary Chinese history are understandably valued byWestern scholars. Having settled in the West, these so-called expa-triates can write about events that they had participated in withoutobvious political censorship. The underlying assumption is thatthey could tell the truth without external pressure. These writerscan therefore provide an ‘insider’ knowledge that a Western writer

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does not have. The main aim of this chapter is, by a case study, todemonstrate that we are well advised not to take at face value theaccounts by former Chinese who now reside in the West. We have to be aware of their backgrounds, their personal interests andprejudices in the production of our knowledge of history.

Memories and the politics of knowledge production

As an indication of personal interest in constructing history we mayfirst take Yuan Ming as an example. The fact that Yuan (1994) idealizesHu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the CCP during the first years ofpost-Mao reform, should not be surprising since the latter was hispatron and protector at the height of their careers.

That one’s personal past is at stake is only one aspect of the produc-tion of knowledge. There is also another aspect of knowledgeproduction: what is expected to be well received. We have to be awareof the politics of the market. Writers such as Jung Chang may turn‘their experience into recognizable stories that satisfy the expectationsof a Western public’, and a ‘literature of suffering’ that ‘mouldedthrough outraged victimization and a broad generational consensus,and simultaneously as an affirmation of a superior Western way of life’(Zarrow 1999: 166–67). Like the film Raise the Red Lantern directed ByZhang Yimou, which invented scenes of Chinese tradition to suit theWest’s curiosity – the kind of scenes that would puzzle the Chinesethemselves – the tendency of the post-Mao literature and arts profes-sionals to commercialize Western voyeurism of the Orient is tooobvious to ignore.

Though Li’s memoirs have been widely reviewed (Mirsky 1994,Young 1994, Bernstein 1994, Link 1994, Wills 1994, Elegant 1994,Buruma 1995 and Teiwes 1996), Li deserves a case study for tworeasons. The first is that the image of Mao propagated in the bookneeds to be corrected. The second is that we need to look at the produc-tion process to reveal at least some aspects of how knowledge ofcontemporary China is manufactured in the West.

Let us start with the academics. Two of the Western scholarsinvolved in the production of the book are not just obscure academicsworking at some obscure topic in isolation but influential public intel-lectuals propagating ways to change China. One of them is AndrewNathan who has served:

on the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch, Asia, andon the board of Human Rights in China. He is frequently inter-viewed about East Asian issues in print and electronic media,and he has served as an advisor to several film documentaries


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on China and as a consultant for businesses and governmentagencies.

(Columbia Education Resources Online http://cero.columbia. edu/help/authors.html)

The other, Anne Thurston, a self-claimed ‘independent scholar’, is aconsultant to the National Endowment for Democracy and host ofViews and Perspectives on Voice of America (Johns Hopkins Universityhttp://apps.sais-jhu.edu/faculty_bios/faculty_bio1. php?ID=56).

The book

The Private Life of Chairman Mao is supposedly written by Mao’spersonal physician of 22 years and close confidant. Simultaneouslypublished by Random House in English and the Chinese TimesPublishing Company of Taipei in Chinese, the book purports to revealMao’s private life, and to denounce the Mao era as an unmitigateddisaster under the dictatorship of an evil monster. That the publicationof this book has such a purpose is confirmed by the review headlines‘The tyrant Mao as told by his doctor (Bernstein 1994), ‘Unmasking themonster’ (Mirsky 1994), ‘Mao the monster (Elegant 1994) and ‘Theemperor has no clothes: Mao’s doctor reveals the naked truth’ (Wills1994). The book was highly acclaimed by prominent academics likeLucian Pye, who thinks ‘this work has tremendous value’ (DeBorja andDong 1996: 2), and Andrew Nathan, who in his Foreword praises thebook’s ‘unique’ and ‘most revealing’ value.

For those who are familiar with the literature in Chinese, there wasin fact very little that was really new in the book when it hit the West-ern market. For the significant figures and events described in Li’sbook, memoirs and biographies published previously in China andHong Kong have revealed as much, if not more. For instance, it waswidely claimed in published volumes that Mao behaved like anemperor and almost every word of his was taken as an imperial edict.Decisions were made by personal whim and those around him wereexpected to pick up the pieces afterwards. Jiang Qing was hysterical,paranoid, unpredictable and vicious. Because she was Mao’s wife,even top-ranking CCP leaders tried not to offend her. Lin Biao waspresented as being chronically sick and having used every opportu-nity to praise Mao so that he could gain more power. Zhou Enlai wasdepicted as acting subserviently to Mao so as to save his own skin.The ‘Hundred Flowers’ campaign was Mao’s plot to lure the intellec-tuals out so that he could strike them as ‘rightists’. The Great LeapForward was Mao’s personal fantasy, which led to the death ofmillions as result of starvation. The Cultural Revolution was a power

H O W A M E D I C A L D O C TO R D O C TO R S H I S TO RY

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struggle that ultimately aimed at finishing Liu Shaoqi. And so on.Broadly speaking, there was not much that was new in Li’s memoirs.

The memoirs purport to show inside knowledge of personal powerstruggle at Mao’s inner court, an area where Teiwes has expertise,having in fact worked on this topic throughout his career (Teiwes 1967,1974, 1978, 1979, 1983, 1984, 1990, 1996, 1998; Teiwes and Sun 1999).According to Teiwes (1996), Li uses ‘Cultural Revolution styleanalysis’; Li was ‘on the fringe of these events’, but claims to be Mao’spolitical confidant; his interpretation was ‘anti-Mao’, ‘reflectingconventional views’, ‘uncritical’ and ‘dependent on official sources’(Teiwes 1996: 179–80) and Li ‘simply got key aspects of the storywrong’ (Teiwes 1996: 182). Teiwes testifies that a substantial part of Li’smemoirs are ‘recycling widely available information and interpreta-tions’ and that with regard to elite politics there is only one piece ofinformation which provides something new; ‘The rest contains nosurprise’ (Teiwes, 1996:179).

Knowledge gap

Li’s memoirs were not based on original records or personal diaries. Allhis original diaries were burned by himself during the Cultural Revolu-tion. Instead, the book is based on restructured memories, which might‘be wrong’ and ‘fallible’ as Li’s collaborator, Anne F. Thurston, later hadto admit (Thurston 1996). One inevitable question then is why the bookis considered to be so valuably revealing. When a colleague of mine,who has long been in a professorial position in Chinese politics workingin Australia, said to me that the book revealed so much that he had notknown, I replied that in fact for those who were familiar with what hasbeen written in the Chinese literature there was not much that was new.This colleague of mine did not seem to register my remarks. This makesone wonder: is it possible that many a scholar in the field of Chinesestudies does not actually read widely what is written in Chinese? Isuspect that this is true, for probably two reasons. One is that for onewho has learned Chinese as a second language the non-alphabetic scriptis not exactly easy to read widely and profusely. Second, some scholarsmay believe, and there is a reason for it, that Chinese materials, includ-ing volumes of books, are not worth reading until and unless they areclosely related to one’s specific target of research. There is therefore aninevitable knowledge gap between what is already available in Chineseand what is accessible to the non-Chinese speaking world.

The knowledge gap provides a partial answer to the question ofwhy the book is so highly acclaimed: what appears new is valuable.However, there is more to it. New information per se may not be inter-esting or even relevant. New information has to be structured and


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made relevant to an argument or a theory. It is therefore worthstressing a truism that scholarship is not independent from politics.

Knowledge production and the market

At any given time of human history, scholarly research has been orien-tated or even dictated by a particular ideology, or by strategic nationalinterest. This is not only a question of the intention of individualscholars but also a question of resources that are available (Dirlik 1996).Furthermore, seemingly non-political values and beliefs influenceresearch agendas and approaches. More of this is discussed in otherchapters. Finally there is commercialism. Publishers like RandomHouse want to make profits and therefore there is a motive forRandom House to ‘sex up’ Li’s memoirs for the market.

Put in these contexts it is more understandable why high profilescholars like Andrew Nathan would, in his Foreword to Li’s memoirs,show a more hostile attitude towards Mao than Li himself whose basictheme is anti-Mao (Teiwes 1996). These contexts explain not only whysuch books are highly acclaimed but also why two US scholars arewilling to be involved in such projects.

With perhaps a few exceptions, all authors need assistance and helpin their work. US scholars’ involvement in Li’s book is nothingunusual. However, the nature of assistance can vary and hence havedifferent influences on the end product. It is inevitable that personalviews of Chinese history by those involved could and would influenceLi’s approach, selection of materials and interpretation of historicalevents. One is particularly struck by the peculiar fact that both theChinese and English versions of Li’s book are products of translation.The English version is acknowledged to be translated by Professor TaiHung-chao while the Chinese version is acknowledged to be translatedby Li himself. One wonders what the original manuscript was.According to Tai, it was Random House the publisher who wanted toadd more ‘juicy bits’ such as Mao’s sex life to the book, to attract alarger readership. Li was in disagreement with this line of approachbut eventually overruled by Random House (Tai Hung-chao 2000).

The logic of the differences in two versions

In fact the production process of the book has far more serious impli-cations than just commercial considerations. Li Zhisui (1996), in a letterthat appeared posthumously, admitted that the Chinese edition wasnot his original Chinese version but a translation from English and thatsubstantial parts of the original Chinese manuscript were cut byThurston. One wonders to what extent the English version of the book


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was written by Li himself. In an Open Letter (for the English text of theOpen Letter, see DeBorja and Dong 1996) published in the Asian Amer-ican Times in New York, Wen hui bao in Hong Kong and the StraitsReview in Taiwan in February 1995, the signatories of the letterdenounced the book and pointed out the discrepancies between theEnglish and Chinese versions. In the Chinese version, claims such asthat the memoirs were based on Li’s diaries, that Li was the best doctorin China, and that Li could recall Mao’s words verbatim are absent.Absent in the Chinese version are also claims about Mao’s womanizingbehaviour spreading venereal disease, statements like ‘I [Mao] washmyself inside the bodies of my women’ or Mao was ‘devoid of humanfeelings’. Absent also were some of Thurston’s notes.

Some of the omissions in the Chinese version indicate the awarenessby the production team that such outrageous claims may be ‘sexy’ tothe English readers but cannot be included in the Chinese version sincethey are too obviously false to the Chinese insiders. Other omissionsare due to political reasons. For instance in the English version, whentalking about Deng’s absence from the 1959 Lushan Conference, itasserts that when in hospital for foot trouble Deng Xiaoping made anurse pregnant and the nurse was forced to have an abortion. That wastaken out in the Chinese version. Deng had not only ‘reversed theverdict’ of the Cultural Revolution but also made China part of thecapitalist world. The Taiwan publisher might feel that such a capitalistroader, though the real butcher of the 1989 Tian’anmen Massacre, wasnot to be offended. Or more likely the publisher knew that the Chinesereaders could not be fooled so easily by such an unsubstantiated claim.

Who is to be fooled and why?

Other discrepancies pointed out in DeBorja and Dong (1996) are alsorevealing, for they again indicate an understanding by those who wereinvolved in the production of this book that a Western reader is easilyand willingly deceived, or has to be fooled. For example in the Englishversion there is this statement: ‘As Mao’s doctor, I was allowed unim-peded access.’ Compare this with the Chinese version: ‘As Mao’sdoctor, only I, when performing a medical examination, have someopportunities to see Mao and have a few words with him’ (DeBorjaand Dong 1996: 48). And there are more. In English it is, ‘When Maoreturned from Beidaihe [in the summer of 1955], I began seeing himevery day, the excuse we often used was his study of English’ whereasin Chinese the second part of the sentence starting with ‘excuse’ isabsent. ‘The study of English’ bit is absent in the Chinese versionbecause among the readers of the Chinese version there would beChinese insiders who would know that Li was not Mao’s teacher of


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English. The Chinese version of ‘Mao stated in his speech at theChengdu meeting’ becomes ‘During our talk in Chengdu’ in English.Different wording is required here because a Chinese insider wouldknow that what follows the opening of the sentence is actually fromMao’s officially published words, not words conveyed to Li in apersonal chat. This kind of truth cannot be shown to the English readerbecause the selling point in the English-speaking market that claims toshow why the value of Li’s book is that Mao revealed Chinese politicsto Li personally, the kind of information that is not available officially.

Protests from the insiders

Apart from the Open Letter, a statement of protest signed by WangDongxing, Li Yinqiao, Ye Zilong and others, altogether 150 people whoworked with Mao or for Mao, was issued (DeBorja and Dong 1996: 4). Agreat deal of fuss was made when Li, supposedly Mao’s personal doctor,claimed that Mao was sexually promiscuous. The statement protestsstrongly against this claim. The Chinese authorities, predictably, alsodenounced both Li’s book and a BBC documentary that echoed hisaccount. Both the protest statement and the Chinese authorities’ appar-ent indignation were dismissed by the Western media, of course.However, another response cannot be dismissed so offhandedly. Lin Ke,Xu Tao and Wu Xujun (Lin Ke et al 1995), who worked as Mao’s secre-tary, personal doctor and chief nurse respectively, have presented ascathing critique of Li.

The very fact that these people are either speaking or writinginside China means that many Western scholars may not take theirviews seriously. This is a legitimate concern since there is heavycensorship by the Chinese authorities and all kinds of political risksin speaking against the Chinese government. But to be critical of Li’santi-Mao book is not exactly supporting the then Chinese govern-ment either since there was a powerful faction inside the CCP thathad been very critical of Mao. In any case, like all other writings,including that by Li Zhisui and Andrew Nathan, we have to assessLin Ke et al’s account against known documentation, its internalconsistency and its compatibility with well-researched knowledge.This is what I am going to do next.

Was Li Mao’s personal physician?

Lin Ke et al claim that Li’s memoirs contain many errors and false-hoods; one of the most obvious is the claim that Li was Mao’s personalphysician as early as 1954. It is logical to assume that Li’s claims aremore trustworthy than Lin Ke et al because Li was writing outside


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China. However, Lin Ke et al do present original documentation asevidence. There is an entry in Mao’s medical record signed by Li whichshows that Li took over the responsibility for looking after Mao’shealth on 3 June 1957. On the other hand, there is no original documen-tation in Li’s book that unambiguously shows that Li was Mao’s doctorbefore 1957. In the book there are only two pictures of Li dated before1957. One is of him standing alone at the Zhongnanhai compound(where some CCP leaders lived) and the other shows him swimmingwith two people. The caption of the swimming picture claims that Li isswimming with Mao, but Mao is not in the picture.

Wu Xujun, who was Mao’s chief nurse (hushi zhang), argues theother photo also makes a false claim. The caption of that photo claimsthat it was taken at Mao’s residence. In fact, as is shown by the back-ground wall in the photo, the photo was taken at a clinic where Liworked, which was far from Mao’s residence (Lin Ke et al 1995: 146–7).Wu points out that more than 180 pages of Li’s memoirs are devoted toLi’s so-called eyewitness account of China and Mao during the yearsbetween 1954 and 1957, but during those years Li was not even Mao’sgeneral practitioner (Lin Ke et el 1995: 150).

How much did the doctor know?

Lin Ke et al also point out Li’s mistaken claim that he had found Maoto be infertile. To affirm that Li was wrong about Mao’s infertility Li Keet al interviewed Professor Wu Jieping, a medial authority who lookedafter Mao (Wu was alive when Li Ke et al was published). Yet Li was adoctor; how could he make such a mistake? The reason, according toLin Ke et al, is that the book has to say somehow that Mao was infer-tile. Otherwise the book has to answer the inevitable question of whereMao’s illegitimate children are since the book claims that Mao hadslept with so many women.

In order to get Li to ‘reveal’ all the important political events aboutwhich Li knew nothing or could not care less, the English versionadded incidents in which Li was present at many exclusive party meet-ings including even the CCP Politburo Standing Committee meetings.It is claimed that Li was present when the Cultural Revolution SmallGroup meeting took place in Wuhan on 8 February 1967. But Lin Ke etal (1995) argue that it was impossible for Li to have been present at allthese meetings because that was against CCP party discipline andregulations. Lin Ke himself, who was much closer to Mao in politicaland policy issues, was not able to attend meetings at this level.

Lin Ke et al point out that personnel such as nurses, bodyguardsor secretaries who worked with Mao and had Mao’s trust all havesome personal memento from Mao, like his notes, instructions, letters


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or calligraphy. But Li could not produce even one such personal item.Lin Ke et al point out, as Li himself admits, Mao did not like doctorsinterfering with his life habits and therefore would not like to have adoctor around him unless absolutely necessary. Moreover, Li did notseem to be someone whom Mao could trust personally. Therefore it islogically inconceivable that Mao would confide to Li his importantthoughts that he would not confide in with others who were closerand more trusted, like Lin Ke or Wu Xujun who was Mao’s trustedchief nurse. Li Zhisui was only Mao’s general practitioner (baojianyisheng) and Lin Ke et al find it laughable that in the memoirs Li isportrayed as omnipresent and omniscient person, as if in 20 years Lihad been with Mao every day wherever he went for a meetingwhether in or outside Beijing.

Li not only pretends to have attended the CCP Eighth Congress withMao, but also claims to have witnessed the clashes between Mao andLiu/Deng. Specifically Li claims that it was Deng, against Mao’s ownwishes, who proposed statements that opposed personality cults andwho proposed deleting a stipulation in the Party Constitution that Maothought should be the guiding thought in every line of work. In fact, itwas Mao who in April 1956, when he made comments on the documentevaluating the historical lesson of the Soviet Union, suggested thatChina should guard against personality cult (Lin Ke et al 1995: 48). It wasMao who suggested that Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yunbe elected as additional deputy chairmen of the CCP and that DengXiaoping be promoted to be the CCP General Secretary (Lin Ke et al1995). It was also Mao, as early as 1954, who made the suggestion ofavoiding the term ‘Mao Zedong Thought’, as it was too arrogant. TheCCP, following Mao’s suggestion, issued a guideline to refer to ‘MaoZedong’s instructions’ and ‘Work by Mao Zedong’ instead (Lin Ke et al1995: 50). All these facts can be confirmed by official documents such asthose in Mao’s collected volumes of speeches.

Li’s memoirs make a claim of Mao sleeping with women under abig quilt. Lin Ke et al ridicule such a claim because it was a well-knownfact that Mao never used quilts after he moved to Beijing but alwaysused towelling coverlets (maojin bei). How could some one who claimsto know Mao intimately get such a simple fact wrong? The answer issimple: because the story is fabricated. That is why, when questionedby a Chinese audience face to face, Li admitted that he had never seenMao in bed with a woman (Li Zhisui 1994).

What did the medical doctor know about politics?

Another critique of Li’s memoirs is also worth considering here. It is anaccount by Qi Benyu (1996 and 2004), a prominent member of the


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Cultural Revolution radicals in Beijing. Qi was arrested at Mao’sinstruction in January 1968 when Mao saw the danger of a backlashwithin the army against the Cultural Revolution. Qi was subsequentlyimprisoned for 18 years. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that hewould not have any personal interest in defending Mao. Qi first of alldismissed the notion of a ‘private doctor’ or ‘personal physician’ bysaying that Mao did not have a private doctor. Every one was ‘public’in those days and Li Zhisui was one of a team of medical staff wholooked after all the personnel at the Zhongnanhai compound until1957. Later Li was recommended by Wang Dongxing to be Mao’shealth-maintenance doctor, a Chinese version of a general practitioner.Second, Qi thinks Li was a good doctor professionally but politicallynaïve and ignorant, and therefore had no knowledge or expertise tocomment on Chinese politics.

Qi gives some examples. Regarding the Great Leap Forward Li didnot know or does not say that it was in fact Mao who first madesuggestions to cool down the CCP elite and to make corrections torectify the exacerbated situation. Regarding the Cultural Revolution:

aside from his account of the support-the-left activities (zhi zuo)in which he [Li] personally participated, most of the CulturalRevolution part of his memoirs consists of stuff gleaned fromnewspapers, journals and other people’s writings. To makeWestern readers believe that he had access to core secrets, Lifabricated scenarios, resulting in countless errors in thememoirs.

(Qi 1996: 187)

Qi thinks ‘It’s really preposterous’ (1996: 189) that Li claims that he waspresent at so many meetings because even Mao’s most trusted RedArmy veteran doctor Fu Lianzhang, who had been on the Long Marchand later was promoted to be Deputy Health Minister, was not allowedsuch access. Nor were Mao’s personal secretaries and bodyguards. Upto the beginning of the Cultural Revolution even Wang Dongxing, thechief of Mao’s personal guards, was not allowed such access.

The politics of sex

Qi lived ‘in the vicinity of Mao Zedong for many years’ (Qi 1996: 192)and had frequent contacts with all the people who worked for Mao.Therefore he should have known if Mao had been fooling around withwomen. Qi does think that Mao should not have married He Zizhenwhen his first wife Yang Kaihui was arrested by the local KMT warlordbut still alive. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 Qi


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even asked Zhou Enlai about Mao’s extramarital affairs. But Qideclares that in all those years he had never heard even a rumour ofMao sleeping with any women outside his marriage and that Li’s accu-sations about Mao’s philandering were lies and fabrications. Qi statesthat Mao’s bedroom had no locks and was never locked. The dutyoffice of the guards, secretaries, nurses and attendants was just outsidethe door. The office operated on a round-the-clock basis, and wasstaffed 24 hours a day; ‘all activities were entered into records’ (Qi1996: 195). Qi states that Mao was very respectful to ‘female comrades’and he had never heard of any complaint of sexual harassment againstMao. He did hear such complaints against other powerful people onthe compound. Qi (2004) continued to hold these views in anotherinterview that took place in 2004.

History as doctored by the doctor and his US mentors: a criticalanalysis

Compared with memoirs and biographies written in China, Li gives amore sympathetic and more believable portrayal of Jiang Qing, whowas isolated, lonely, depressed and desperately wanted attention.However, Li’s assertion that Jiang Qing wanted to be a modern WuZetian, a powerful empress, was blatantly parroting the Chinese offi-cial propaganda and Chinese intelligentsia’s accustomed Confucianapproach to history.

The most surprising aspect of Li’s book is his portrayal of WangDongxing as understanding, intelligent, skilful but not at all fearful.Wang was one of the few most powerful men in the Mao era andcarried out routine duties to implement Mao’s personal instructions. Itis very hard to reconcile Li’s two portraits: on the one hand his descrip-tion of a vengeful and power paranoid emperor Mao and on the otherof a benign Wang Dongxing who was Director of the Central Office ofthe CCP and head of Mao’s bodyguards. Li claims that WangDongxing is his friend, but Wang nonetheless joined the protest againstLi’s book.

Li’s account of events such as Mao’s meeting with his former wifeHe Zizhen, his quarrel with Peng Dehuai at Lushan and the dismissalof his bodyguard Han Qingyu, are claimed by Lin Ke et al (1995) tohave contained errors of detail that were exactly the same as those toldby Ye Yonglie. The fact that dancing parties were organized for the topleaders and that Mao had many young women around him in his lateryears was no secret before Li’s book was published.

For someone who claims to have had Mao’s confidence even inpolitical matters, Li fails to offer any insight on many significantfigures and events. For instance he gives no explanation as to why Lin


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Biao, who hated ceremonies, and hated meeting foreigners (Jiang Boand Li Qing 1993, Jiao Ye 1993, Wen Feng 1993, Guan Weixun 1993,Teiwes and Sun 1996), and who was designated as Mao’s successor inthe State Constitution in 1969, wanted the position of Chairman of theState, the primary function of which would be to meet foreigners.According to Quan Yanchi, far from being a good-for-nothing cowardwho acted subserviently to Mao in order to gain power, Lin Biao wasarrogant and was one of the very few who dared to confront Maopersonally if he disagreed with him. The only thing Lin Biao would notdo was to criticize Mao publicly or behind his back. That Lin Biaowanted to take power from Mao was a conventional view touted bythe Chinese government official line. According to Wang Nianyi andHe Shou (2000) there was very little evidence that Lin Biao wanted topursue a power struggle with Mao at the fatal Lushan Conference in1970. Mao was angry with Lin Biao not because the latter wanted totake power from him, but because Mao was afraid that there was a LinBiao faction against his Cultural Revolution line.

The Chinese intelligentsia like to use Mao’s own words of ‘luringsnakes out of holes’ to argue that Mao had conspired to ‘strike’ downintellectuals by inviting their criticisms of the CCP leadership prior theAnti-Rightist Movement in 1957. Li not only believes this but also goesfurther by claiming that Mao’s real aim was to incite attack against thepolitical foes who had challenged him during the Eighth Party Congressin 1956. However, Mao’s own words should not always be taken at facevalue to interpret his intention and action. It is not only possible butlikely that Mao used the phrase ‘to lure snakes out of holes to strike’ tojustify his backfired plan of the Hundred Flowers (which was designedto invite criticisms of the CCP) to those of his comrades who wereagainst the idea at the very beginning. In a book based on his doctoratethesis, Zhu Di (1995) argues convincingly that Mao’s Hundred Flowerspolicy to rectify the Party was intended to reduce the tensions andconflicts made manifest by protests and strikes in Chinese society in1956 after Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Report’ denounced Stalin and the polit-ical events in Poland and Hungary. There were a whole range of compli-cated theoretical and practical issues, which cannot be discussed here,that worked together to lead to a nasty Anti-Rightist Movement.

Zhu Di’s arguments may well be just one interpretation, and thebook was published in China, a fact that reduces its credibility formany in the West. However, the fact remains that Zhu Di’s book is wellresearched with footnotes and is based on documentary evidence thatcan be checked and examined. In contrast, even if Li was Mao’spersonal physician since 1954 as claimed by Li himself, what Mao actu-ally said to Li in private cannot be confirmed by supporting evidence.

There are other questionable claims made by Li about Mao that


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cannot be backed up by documentary evidence.2 To support the themethat all Mao’s moves after 1956 were aimed at toppling Liu Shaoqi, Liclaims that Mao wanted to close down the special clinics for top-ranking CCP leaders because he heard that Li Shaoqi had suffered lungdisease. However, according to Lin Ke et al (1995), Mao ordered theclosure of the special clinics in 1964 whereas Liu Shaoqi’s lung diseasewas already cured in 1963.

Mao’s accusation in 1965 that the Ministry of Health was the‘Ministry of the Urban Lord’ not only had nothing to do with anypower struggle, but had much to do with policy direction. Towards theend of the 1950s Mao retreated to the second line of leadership and letLiu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Peng Zhen runthe day-to-day affairs of China until 1965. It was during these yearsthat China’s healthcare became more routinized, bureaucratized andprofessionalized. In this process of professionalization, healthcarebecame a system that catered for the urban sector, especially the CCP,PLA and professional elite. Mao was not happy with this state of affairsand therefore wanted to change policy directions. To do so he had toupset the establishment, and therefore particular individuals in theestablishment were affected. It was not an issue of personal ego but apolicy issue, though policy change inevitably involved personal powerstruggle. What happened during the late 1960s and early 1970s, likesending many urban doctors to rural areas, setting up the ‘barefootdoctor’ system and the policies and practices that improved healthcarefor tens of millions of rural people, clearly confirms that the change inthe health system was not a power struggle issue but a policy issue.

Li also claims that whenever Mao disliked anyone, or suspectedanyone’s loyalty or wanted to punish anyone, he would send thatperson into exile to a labour camp. This interpretation, again, runsagainst documentary evidence. Mao regularly sent his bodyguardsand his personnel to grassroots unit to work and to live with the ordi-nary people for the purpose of getting to know what life was like atgrassroots and of improving their personal qualities. He sent his mostvalued son Mao Anying to work with peasants as soon as the lattercame back from Moscow to Yan’an. During the Cultural Revolution,Mao sent his daughter Li Na to an farm in Jiangxi. It was the CCP’sdeclared policy that its party officials should live and work with theordinary people. As a person from a rural background, Mao’s decisionto send his staff and children to the countryside might have beeninspired by the rural Chinese cultural value that one had to chi ku (eatbitterness): that is, to undergo hardship, to appreciate life and to be aworthy person. It is reasonable enough that people like Li fromwealthy and Western-trained backgrounds could not understand sucha philosophy. However, to ignore documented evidence so as to twist


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Mao’s stated intention to suit the theme of personal power struggle isa different matter.

Once the theme of personal power struggle is set up as a theoreticalframework, there is a tendency to argue that every move by Mao wasdesigned to underpin his personal power. In his Foreword to Li’s book,Nathan states that ‘After the famine began, Mao retreated to asecondary position of power’ (Li Zhisui 1994: xii). What is not said butimplied in this statement is that Mao had lost power and had to launchthe Cultural Revolution to re-gain it. In fact by giving up the Chair-manship of the State and by retreating to the second line ofgovernment, Mao did not retreat to a ‘secondary position of power’.The Chinese term er xian (second line), a term used, again, by Maohimself to refer to his resignation of the post the chairmanship of theState, does not mean a second line of power. Anyone who knows thereal nature of Chinese politics should know that the real power lay inthe hands of the Chairman of the CCP. Liu Shaoqi as Chairman of theState and Zhou Enlai as Premier of the State Council were at the fore-front of day-to-day affairs. But the Chairman of the CCP was meant tobe pulling the strings behind the curtain (Teiwes 1988).

The statement by Nathan quoted above also implies that Maoretreated because of the failure of the Great Leap Forward. However, itwas Mao himself who raised the issue of er xian and volunteered togive up the State Chairmanship as early as 1956. In April 1959, whenLiu Shaoqi was publicly declared to have taken over the post ofChairman of the State, Mao’s prestige both in name and in realityremained intact. A serious crack in his prestige began to appear onlyafter the Lushan Conference later in 1959 when Peng Dehuai mounteda challenge to him. Even that challenge was not serious because the fulleffect of the disastrous Great Leap Foreword was not manifest until ayear or so later.

Here are another couple of damming statements by Nathan: ‘He[Mao] thought there was more to learn about leadership from thepages of Chinese history than from textbooks of modern engineering.While people starved, he imagined that they had more than they couldeat’ (Li Zhisui 1994: xi). The first sentence again implies more than itstates. Even today no Chinese leader, or Western leader for that matter,would think textbooks of modern engineering can teach them how tolead their country. The point Nathan wants to make is that Mao was toblame for the boasting and falsification of agricultural productivityand the backyard furnaces making iron and steel during the GreatLeap Forward that led to disastrous consequences. However, thereality was more complex than this criticism implies. To start with,backyard furnaces were not Mao’s invention. Nor did they come aboutbecause of Mao’s order. In fact, as even Li has to admit, Mao was very


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sceptical and kept on asking: if backyard furnaces were so good, whydo foreign countries have big iron and steel plants instead? As for thecredibility of reports of agricultural outputs in astronomical figures,there is documentary evidence that Mao did not believe them and, astestified by Wu Lengxi (1995), Mao warned caution all the time, thoughhe was assured by the distinguished scientist Qian Xuesheng (Li Rui1994, Cai Yongmei 1992) that it was possible to produce tens of thou-sands of kilograms of rice on one mu of land if the crop had enoughventilation and light.3 Qian probably meant that it was theoreticallypossible if planting was close enough and if the problems of ventilationand light could be solved.

Liu Shaoqi, known to be pragmatic and level-headed, not onlysupported of the Great Lead Forward ideas that proved to be disastrousbut also initiated them. It was he who, with Zhou Enlai and Lu Dingyi, theMinister of Propaganda, on a train in April 1958, discussed the idea offactories running schools and schools running factories. Liu wanted WuZhipu, the Party Secretary of Henan Province to experiment with theseideas, and Henan became one of the worst hit famine provinces. It was Liuwho said that China could catch up with the UK in two years and whodemanded that the farmers should produce yet more when he was toldabout already incredible yields. It was Liu who said that the publiccanteen was good for liberating women from the kitchen and that back-yard steel making was worth experimenting with because even failurewould teach a lesson (Bo 1997: 731–33, Chen Xianong 2006: 159).

Bo Yibo (1997: 753) mentions that a ‘responsible comrade’ (fuzetongzhi) in mid-September 1958 even suggested to Mao that every onein China should eat to their full without having to pay, but Mao did notaccept this suggestion. Bo does not want to reveal the name of thecomrade. According to Chen Xianong (2006: 168–170) the comrade wasnone other than Liu Shaoqi. It was not just Liu. In May 1959 both ZhuDe and Zhou Enlai raised the idea of ceasing the practice of publiccanteens, but Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen wrote to Mao to opposethe idea of abolishing them (Chen Xianong 2006: 198). During the 1961Guangzhou Conference Chen Boda, after an investigative tour, alsosubmitted a report to Mao suggesting the abolition of public canteens.Mao tabled the report as the number one document for the conference.However, during a discussion on the matter both Tao Zhu and ZhaoZiyang (later Premier and then General Secretary of the CCP duringthe post-Mao reform until he was purged by Deng for opposing theTian’anmen crackdown) argued against Chen Boda’s suggestion bysaying the public canteen practice was good (Chen Xianong 2006: 195).

Even Deng Xiaoping had to admit openly that he and other CCPleaders should be also held responsible for the Great Leap Forwarddisaster because they supported the ideas and policies. However, Deng


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did not want to admit that what he did was more than passivelysupport Mao. Deng was the General Secretary of the CCP at that timeand was not only responsible for implementing the Great LeapForward policies but also for acting as the interface between the centre,headed by Mao, and various regional and provincial leaders who putthe ideas and policies in practice. It is therefore not surprising thatduring the Seven Thousand Delegates meeting in Beijing in early 1962,when Mao made a public criticism of himself for the Great LeapForward disaster, Deng defended Mao by saying that mistakes weremade because his office of the General Secretariat did not follow Mao’sideas to the spirit (Zhang Suhua 2006). Deng’s defence of Mao was soeffusive that even Mao was embarrassed (Wu Lengxi 2000: 317). It isalso not surprising that Deng defended his ally and friend, LiJingquan, who was the CCP boss of the Southwest region and principalleader of Sichuan province where the famine death toll was the worst(Zhang Suhua 2006).

The second sentence by Nathan quoted above is very ambiguous.During the height of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, Mao, like otherCCP leaders, did have the illusion that peasants could produce morethan they could eat. However, by 1959 he began to be cautious. In fact,it was Mao who put a stop to some of the stupid practices of the GreatLeap Forward in late 1958, as pointed out by Lin Ke et al (1995). Asearly as March 1958 Mao instructed the chief editor of the People’sDaily, Wu Lengxi, not to publish a report from Henan on its wish listof what could be achieved in three years. Mao said the tone must beadjusted and cold water had to be poured on those who were full ofthemselves (Wu Lengxi 1995: 63–4). Again and again in April, Augustand November 1958 Mao told Wu that the media had to be cool-headed and had to tone down publicity about unrealistic productiontargets, that they should not inspire unrealistic production targets, andthat their news and reports had to be realistic, cautious and down toearth. In June 1958 Mao instructed Peng Zhen and Deng Xiaoping tomake sure that the media changed their direction from inflatedreporting to cool realism. According to Wu (1995) it was not Mao butother leaders who were in charge of the propaganda work who wereslow to change.

It is true that Mao might have acted as an emperor and his wordswere treated as God-given by many. However, anyone who has a rudi-mentary knowledge of China should know that not everything thathappened in China under Mao’s rule was his own doing. It is thereforeincredible for a scholar of international standing to make simplisticand naïve statements such as ‘He [Mao] froze the people’s standard ofliving at subsistence level in order to build a massive wasteful indus-trial structure’ (Nathan in Li Zhisui 1994: x). Mao is taken as a God who


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had not only the power but the intention of freezing the Chinesepeople’s standard of living.

As it is common knowledge, most of the concrete economic policymeasures that were responsible for the people’s standard of livingwere not designed, let alone implemented, by Mao himself. The poli-cies of monopoly sale and purchase of agricultural produce, therationing of commodities and the grades of salaries, some imple-mented before the Great Leap Forward and some after, were designedby people like Chen Yun, Li Fuchun and Bo Yibo. The policy ofsqueezing the peasantry and controlling consumption was based onthe Soviet model to accumulate capital for industrial development.

In fact Mao was not happy with China’s copying the Soviet Modelof economic development in which everything was planned from thecentre. The Great Leap Forward was an attempt to find an alternativein which planning was not concentrated in Beijing. An indication ofthis idea is the fact during the Great Leap Forward all the importantconferences about policies were not held in Beijing but locally:Zhengzhou, Wucahn, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Nanning. Clearly Maowanted a decentralized model of development in which various levelsof leadership and the broad masses of workers and farmers partici-pated in the planning process of economic construction. It was largelydue to the work along this direction during the Great Leap Forwardand later in the Cultural Revolution that China’s post-cold war reformswere able to develop differently from those of the former Soviet Unionand to succeed (Shirk 1993).

Mao’s strategy of a different approach was not only premised on thefact that there were not enough technical and professional experts inChina when the Communists took over power. More importantly, asbrilliantly analysed by Schumann (1968), Mao did not want the profes-sional and technical elite to monopolize economic planning andmanagement. He wanted the non-expert to lead the expert (waihanglingdao neihang) and wanted politics to control economic activities andensure that 1) a correct political line was upheld and 2) the masses andrevolutionaries who were not experts were not marginalized inproduction and construction.

Of course to do that Mao had to bring the others along, and in tryingto bring his colleagues along he was very often bullying and dictatorial.At the end of the day, most, if not all, of Mao’s colleagues did go alongand some of them even went further than Mao intended. According toChen Boda (Chen Xiaonong 2006), it was Bo Yibo, Chair of the powerfulEconomic Commission who was responsible for the backyard furnaces.In fact the three fatal ideas all came from Bo: China could catch up theUK in two years (in this he was supported by Liu Shaoqi), that industryshould focus on the production of iron and stee, and that the target


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output of iron and steel in 1958 should be double the 5.35 million tonsproduced in 1957 (Chen Xiaonong 2006: 181–4, Bo Yibo 1997: 706–7). LiRui, the self-proclaimed secretary of Mao (more of him in another chap-ter) on the other hand, choses not to reveal these suggestions of Bo Yibo’sin his influential A Record of the Lushan Conference (Li Rui 1994) becausethat would weaken the anti-Mao thesis of his book.

Mao must be held principally responsible for the Great LeapForward disaster since he not only was at the centre of the policy-making process (MacFarquhar 1974–1997) but also encouraged theLeap from co-ops to the commune system and even bullied Zhou Enlaiand Deng Zihui (Teiwes and Sun 1999) for their initial cautious atti-tudes. However, documentary evidence (see discussion in otherchapters) and recently available testimonials do suggest that thepicture is much more complex than what is usually presented as in LiRui (1994) and Alfred Chan (2001). It is certainly not as simple asNathan wants us to believe.

Of course, there was a power struggle within the CCP, as there is apower struggle in any political institution, past or present, oriental oroccidental. Like any politician, Mao wanted power and control.However, to reduce everything to personal power and control not onlylacks insight but is actually naïve and fanciful. To reduce every eventor policy change to a personal power struggle is exactly what Li does.For instance, the fact that Mao was critical of Khrushchev’s secretreport denouncing Stalin is interpreted as Mao’s attempt to maintainthe need for a personality cult and to avoid the potential danger of hisbeing demoted. This kind of interpretation is infantile. As a leader ofthe largest communist party in the world, Mao’s criticism ofKhrushchev was not only not personal but also logical and consistent.Personally, Mao should have felt vindicated by Khrushchev’s denunci-ation of Stalin, who had never really trusted him. From Mao’s point ofview, Stalin could and should be criticized, but the criticism must beconstructive. Mao actually thought that a correct evaluation of Stalinshould be 70 per cent positive and 30 per cent negative. For many thisjudgement did not do enough to condemn Stalin’s brutality andreflected Mao’s identification with Stalin’s murderous ways of dealingwith his political rivals. But the matter was far more complex than that.

Pragmatically Mao’s defence of Stalin was a tactical defence for thesake of the strategic cause of communism. In Mao’s view, Khrushchev’sdenunciation of Stalin would seriously damage the cause of Commu-nism all over the world. Subsequent events proved that Mao was right.Theoretically, he had serious ideological disagreement with Khrushchev.To start with, he did not agree with Khrushchev’s argument that peace-ful transition from capitalism to communism was possible. Furthermore,Khrushchev had not the intellectual capacity to entertain the Maoist idea


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that a capitalist class might develop inside a communist party. It wasthose principled and principal differences between Mao and the Sovietleaders that finally led to the fallout between China and Soviet Union(Shen 2007).

Within the existing theoretical framework of the communist move-ment at that time, Mao’s worries were entirely logical and non-personal.What Khrushchev initiated was ‘revisionism’, which was the primaryideological target during the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao.Subsequent developments also proved that Mao was right. ‘Capitalistroaders’ were inside the CCP and the reversion to capitalism in the formerSoviet Union and China were initiated by Communist leaders themselves.If our evaluation of Mao is made within this framework, Mao’s criticismof Khrushchev, which anticipated the Cultural Revolution, made politicaland ideological sense.

Conclusion: history what history?

This chapter has presented some critical analysis of Li Zhisui’smemoirs in relation to the process of the production of knowledge, andto many claims about Mao and CCP politics and events. Clearly thevalue of such books is very limited, much more so considering theproduction process. Of course, we cannot demand that all writers ofmemoirs and biographies should address all the social and politicalissues. To write memoirs especially, every individual writer is boundto write from his or her own experience. Not everyone is a politicalscientist or sociologist or historian. However, the reader woulddemand a little more from a book on Mao, especially one that isassisted and managed by scholars on China. In Li’s memoirs, however,there is no social history and there are no policy issues. There are onlypower struggles and personal intrigues.

In a sense the issue comes down to whose history we are talkingabout. Li and his mentors want to write a history that is not only anti-Mao and anti-communist, but also elitist and sensational. It is ironic –and if not that ironic it is certainly curious – that prominent scholars inthe West, who obviously take themselves to be cold warriors and there-fore guardians or promoters of democracy, actually take the sameapproach as elitist Confucian historiography: no social policies andpolitical theories are important enough to be discussed unless they arerelated to the personal power struggle of Mao, who led one of the mostimportant social revolutions in the twentieth century.

Li’s approach to history can be seen by the claimed exchangebetween him and Mao on the subject of Qin Shihuang, the firstemperor of China. Li says ‘But the Chinese people hated him becausehe executed the Confucian scholars and burned the classic books’ (Li


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Zhisui 1994: 122).4 The term ‘Chinese people’ is used here of course tocontrast himself with Mao the dictator who is known to be less criticalof Qin Shihuang. This is a standard line of the elitist Chinese historiog-raphy: the real Chinese people – that is, the majority of the Chinesepopulation – are denied their history, but they are always spoken onbehalf of. The peasants rose against the Qin regime not because of theexecution of scholars and the burning of classic books but because ofthe heavy levies and coolie labour. It is doubtful whether the majorityof the Chinese, past or present, even know that Qin Shihuang executedscholars and burned classic books. It is no less doubtful whether theycare about it.

Li, who was praised and trusted in the West because he was Westerntrained (Nathan in Li Zhisui 1994: xiii), says of Empress Wu Zetian (AD627–705) that ‘She was too suspicious, had too many informers, andkilled too many people’ (Li Zhisui 1994: 123). In reality, Wu Zetianmight be very different from the caricature of a bitch and a witchportrayed by the Confucian scholars, whose attitudes towards womenare well known. In responding to Li’s opinion (if the conversationindeed took place), Mao tried to insert some politics and social historyinto the interpretation of Wu Zetian, telling Li:

Well, Wu Zetian was a social reformer. She promoted the inter-ests of the medium and small landlords at the expense of thenobility and the big families. If she had not been suspicious, ifshe had not relied on informers, how could she have discoveredthe plots the nobles and the big families were hatching to over-throw her? And why shouldn’t she execute the people whowere plotting to kill her?

(Li Zhisui 1994: 122)

However, to Li, this only shows that Mao wanted to copy the cruellestrulers in Chinese history. He observes that ‘Mao’s view of history wasradically different from that of most Chinese.’ ‘Morality had no placein Mao’s politics’ he asserts (Li Zhisui 1994: 122). It was no wonder thatMao had to say to Li that the latter’s view of Chinese history was alltaken from Peking operas.


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7 Challenging the hegemony:contrary narratives in the e-Media (I) – Mao and theCultural Revolution

Introduction: emerging contrary narratives

Discussions of various biographical and memoir writings in previouschapters clearly show that the dominant narrative is a total denigrationof the Cultural Revolution and almost instinctive denunciation of theMao era, either explicitly or implicitly. I have argued that this hege-monic narrative, in many ways methodologically similar to traditionalChinese historiography, does not only purport to serve the present (inChapter 3) but is also framed by the present (in Chapter 2). Thisconstruction of an anti-Maoist (Chapter 4) and anti-revolutionary(Chapter 5) history went hand in hand with the collapse of existingsocialism and ascendance of neoliberalism in China (Wang Hui, 2004).

Hegemony can never be total and there have been dissenting voicesfrom the very beginning when the anti-Maoist and anti-revolutionarywere forming alliances in and outside China. The dissenting voices inChina have gathered pace since 1997 after the American bombing ofthe Chinese embassy in Belgrade, as represented in the journals Dushuand Tianya (Wang Hui, 2004). There have, however, also beendissenting voices from another source, and that is the e-media, bothinside and outside China. These dissenting voices have been gettinglouder and louder as the consequences of post-Mao reform have beenmore and more visible and more keenly felt.

The issue that draws most attention in the e-media is the evaluationof Mao the man. Very much related to that evaluation but oftendiscussed separately is the issue of assessing the Cultural Revolution.For a long time in China it has been taken for granted that the CulturalRevolution had nothing positive to talk about and ‘the ten-yeardisaster of the Cultural Revolution’ had become the accepted wisdom,just as it was once accepted that the sun revolved around the earth.However, the wisdom is increasingly being questioned now in the e-media. In May 2007, a familiar e-media participant with the pen nameof Jingan Jushi (2007) proclaimed: ‘China should objectively andhistorically evaluate the merits and demerits of Mao.’

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Media effect, public space and e-media

That media set the public agenda and have an effect on what the publicthinks is a well-known social phenomenon in contemporary life.McCombs and Shaw (1972) are credited as the first to have researchedagenda setting; they found that there was an almost perfect correlationbetween media agenda and public opinion. Funkhouser (1973) alsodemonstrated a strong correlation between US media agendas andpublic concerns, as measured by the ranking of issues in opinion polls.A study in West Germany by Brosius and Kepplinger (1990) demon-strates that while people’s own previous knowledge was important,media coverage did indeed raise public awareness. The media mightnot tell the public what to think but they do tell them what to thinkabout. Brosius and Kepplinger also show that public awareness in turnexercises a significant causal influence on media coverage. Again,Dearing and Rogers (1996) show that among the agenda-settingresearch studies reviewed in their research, 60 per cent confirm a corre-lation between media and public agenda. They also find 1) that newsorganizations tend to hunt in packs, continually monitoring eachothers’ output and following very similar editorial strategies, and 2)that real-world indicators are relatively unimportant in setting themedia agenda.

Members of the Glasgow University Media Group also confirmedthese findings. People are able to resist dominant messages if they candeploy personal experience in a critical way or have knowledgeacquired through alternative sources (Eldridge et al 1997). For examplethose with direct experience of life in Northern Ireland were morelikely to question the dominant news definition of the ‘Troubles’(Miller 1994). However the Glasgow Group also finds that personalexperience cannot be artificially isolated from ‘broad media andcultural factors’ (Kitzinger 1999: 8). ‘Peoples’ experience cannot beregarded as a separate resource uncontaminated by previous mediaexposure’ (Manning 2001: 223). Kitzinger (1993) and Miller et al (1998)show that media 1) supply ‘facts and figures’, 2) develop vocabularyand 3) generate images that have a powerful impact upon publicunderstanding. In other words, ‘the media can be powerful influenceon what audiences believe and what is thought to be legitimate ordesirable’ (Philo 1999: 287)

The Chinese government exerts very strict control over the offi-cial media. Precisely for this reason, the e-media as an alternativeplay a more important role in China than they do in the West,making it possible for unofficial values and attitudes to beexpressed and promoted among the Chinese. There have been livelydebates on many issues important to China and the world on the


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e-media despite continuous official attempts of censorship, includ-ing arrests of Internet users. By 2003 there were reportedly 70million registered users of the Internet in China. According to whatis still an emerging research (Hughes 2003, Hughes and Wacker2003, Chase and Mulvenon 2002, Kalathil and Boas 2003), Internetaccess can be a potent tool for change in attitude, values and evensocial structures.

The widely publicized case of Sun Zhigang provides evidence thatthe e-media does indeed play a very influential role. In June 2003 Sun,a rural migrant, was arrested, detained by the police and then beatento death in Guangzhou for no reason other than the fact that he was notcarrying the right papers with him. The news was exposed by SouthernMetropolis Daily and was spread by the e-media, which were floodedwith protests. The Chinese government ordered an investigation of thecase and finally enacted a law that abolished the notorious detentioncentres targeted at migrant workers. Though one cannot say for certainthat e-media protests were the direct cause of this very significantchange, which affected tens of millions of migrant workers, it certainlyplayed a key role as catalyst.

There has been another example in 2007. Having failed to find anyconventional ways to get themselves heard, 400 fathers signed anInternet petition that asks the public to rescue their children workingin illegal brick kilns as slaves. The e-media publication led to nationaloutrage, so much so that the central government had to intervene torectify the slave labour situation in China (Bu Luo 2007).

It is within the context of this great surge of e-media that thehegemony of the public space by the state media and official mediahas been challenged. It is within this context of challenge that the e-media counter-narratives of Mao, the Mao era and the CulturalRevolution emerged. In this chapter, the first part of a study of thee-media challenge to the mainstream narratives, I examine howattempts are being made in the e-media to re-evaluate Mao and theCultural Revolution. In the second analysis of the e-media challengein the next chapter I will outline some of the main arguments forrepudiating the mainstream narrative regarding issues of theChinese economy, the Great Leap Forward, Jiang Qing, healthcare,education and so on. Obviously the issues of the two chapters over-lap and the discussion of the state of the economy cannot be sepa-rated from the evaluation of Mao. Even so, the issues are dividedbetween two chapters here so that each chapter is not too long andthat the discussions can be structured for easy reading. E-mediacoverage in these two chapters focuses on the Internet, excludingany coverage of media such as SMS (mobile phone short messageservice), MSN and QQ.1

C H A L L E N G I N G T H E H E G E M O N Y I

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Ma Yinchu, population control and elite attitudes

Mao was a very complex personality, and as a political leader his ideasand work had impacts on the lives of millions of Chinese. Evaluation ofa man of such historical importance inevitably requires us to engagewith almost every issue of human life in China. One of these involvesChina’s population. There has been a consensus among the public policymakers that there are too many people in China and the population hasto be controlled. If, for the sake of argument, we put aside the moral ortheological issues of whether human life is intrinsically and inherentlysacred, we should note that there can be endless debates on how manypeople within a national boundary are considered to be too many andwhether people are valuable resources or a waste of resources. For abrief period of time, at least during the 1950s, Mao happened to be onewho thought that humans might be resources rather than constraints onChina’s economic development. However, this does not mean Mao didnot agree to some control of the population. In fact during the 1950s and1960s measures were taken to slow population growth, though not ascoercively as during the post-Mao reform years.2

Nevertheless, one of the crimes that Mao is being accused of is thathe made the Chinese population explode because he wrongly criti-cized a demography professor who advocated population control. Yi(2007) confronts the issue head on by arguing that it was groundless toblame Mao for the great population surge in China and that the accu-sation was politically motivated. According to Yi, in 1979 Hu Yaobang,then the Minister of Organization and Secretary of the CCP, is reportedto have shed a few tears when he read the file of Professor Ma Yinchuof Beijing University and said something like: if the Chairman listenedto Ma Yinchu, China would not have had more than 1 billion peoplenow. This wrongful criticism of one person led to a population increaseof many millions. On 5 of August 1979 an article with a rhythmical andpoetic headline ‘Cuo pi yi ren, wu zeng san yi’ (Wrongful criticism of oneperson led to a damaging population increase of 300 million) appearedin the so-called intellectual paper the Guangming Daily.3 The headlinesummarizes what has been the accepted wisdom on the issue of popu-lation in contemporary Chinese historiography. When Ma wasrehabilitated he was hailed as a Marxist. Yi, however, argues not onlythat Professor Ma was not a Marxist but also that he said nothing orig-inal but just repeated a platitude of Marx’s adversary Malthus, whoseview on population has been proved to be wrong. Yi argues thatChina’s population increased so much not simply because there weretoo many births but also because there were fewer deaths. This was theresult of the social and economic revolution and improvement of livingconditions for the majority of the people in China.


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But that is precisely the issue: should the state waste money on theuneducated low-quality people? On a social occasion in June 2007 Imet a professor from the prestigious Beijing Normal University, HuangZuoyue, a highly educated member of the Chinese intelligentsia, wholooked smooth and urbane. When Huang told me that Chinese govern-ment at all levels had so much money these days that officials did nothow to spend it, I asked why they did not spend the money on educa-tion and healthcare for the poor. Professor Huang’s response wassomething classic: There are too many people in China and if you spentone dollar on each person it would be too costly. This is a professorwho, during our conversation, not only thought it acceptable to builden suite bathrooms in professors’ offices at some leading Chineseuniversities but even expressed pride in the plan.

Pointing out that the Chinese elite all jump onto the wagon ofcondemning the Great Leap Forward famine as if it was Mao who hadmurdered millions of people, Yi then asks: Why don’t they condemn thepopulation control policy for murdering so many millions? What aboutthe 1.7 millions girls that are missing according to the normal genderratio? Shui Han (2007), another e-media participant, argues that themissing girls actually number as many as 40 million. Shui Han presentsdetailed historical evidence, elaborate charts, figures and statistics toshow that Mao was right (and Ma was wrong) in not advocating a coer-cive population control policy because the very strength of China lies inits population. In order to combat a population control policy that isconsidered to be disastrous Shui Han has created a population policywebsite (http://www.shengyu.org/) to encourage debates.

The credibility of Li Rui

One influential argument constructed by memoir, autobiographic andbiographic writings about Mao is that after 1956 he did nothing posi-tive for China. This is the so-called later Mao thesis (wan nian MaoZedong). One person who is very influential in promoting the later Maothesis is Li Rui. Following the veteran tradition of constructing Chinaas an Oriental despotism, Li Rui thinks China under the late Mao wasruled by autocracy. His utterances attract a serious audience and onehigh-profile US academic with a mainland China’s background creditsLi for first applying the term ‘autocracy’ to the Chinese regime anduses it a key word in the title of his recent book (Pei 2006). In a list ofthe 50 most influential people in China produced by Kerry Brown(2007) for Chatham House and Open Democracy, Li Rui is includedahead of Jiang Zeming, the General Secretary of the CCP for eightyears, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Li used to be the DeputyMinister of Irrigation and wrote more than a dozen of anti-Mao works,


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including the very influential The Tragedy of the Late Mao: PersonalRecord of Mao’s Secretary.

Li Rui’s condemnation of Mao is influential for several reasons. Oneis that he is one of the high-ranking party officials, a so-called insiders’insider. Another is that he claims to be a Mao expert since he haswritten a biography of the young Mao that had inspired many Maoadmirers. However what seems most compelling is that Li claims to beMao’s secretary and to be recognized as such in the field (Pei 2006: 4).In order to question Li’s credentials, one of the e-media participantsgoes to a great length to show that Li’s claim to have been one of Mao’ssecretaries is misleading (Yue 2006). According to Li himself, he wasasked by Mao to be a secretary but declined, pleading the excuse ofbeing too busy. Li then agreed to be Mao’s part-time secretary (jianzhimishu), which in fact meant that Li was, in Mao’s words, a tongxun yuan(correspondent). During this period Li was not stationed in Beijing butworked full time at the Hunan Provincial Propaganda Department inChangsha. How can Li claim to be Mao’s secretary when in fact eventhe role of being a correspondent lasted only 19 months, from January1958 to August 1959? Mao wanted Li to be one of his correspondentsafter listening to a debate on the pros and cons of building the ThreeGorges Dam. Mao was impressed with Li’s argument against such aproject and decided to shelve it. As Huang Yunsheng (2007) furtherpoints out, Li’s role as a correspondent secretary was confined only tomatters of irrigation and hydropower because of that encounter.

Li Rui is accused of being economical with the truth in anotherinstance. During the early years of the PRC’s history China copiedthe Soviet Union by conducting the May 1 Labour Day parade duringwhich slogans were chanted to indicate the CCP’s policy and ideol-ogy. Li Rui claims that for the 1950 May Day parade Mao himselfinserted ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ as the last one on the list of offi-cial slogans.4 But Huang avers that Li is lying. First of all, Li said thatthe information was given to him by Zhu De’s secretary orally, but Lidid not made such a claim until after Zhu’s secretary had safelypassed away. Second, the official list of slogans published in thePeople’s Daily on 27 April 1950 did not contain the slogan ‘Long LiveChairman Mao’. The last entry on the list was actually ‘Long Live theGreat Leader of the Chinese People, Comrade Mao Zedong’. Third,the slogan list was first drafted by the Central Propaganda Ministry,as always, and they did propose ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’. It wasLiu Shaoqi, not Mao, who crossed it out and changed it to ‘Long Livethe Great Leader of the Chinese People, Comrade Mao Zedong’. Thiscan be confirmed by the handwriting of Liu Shaoqi as seen in the firstvolume of Manuscripts by Liu Shaoqi since the Establishment of the PRCthat was published in April 2005.


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Li was once openly challenged when he was an invited speaker atthe highly acclaimed Yuexi Seminar Series in Zhengzhou. As he wasrepeating his usual anti-Maoist stand by claiming that the uprightand honest Peng Dehuai had been victimized at the Lushan Confer-ence in 1959 by the dictator Mao, some members of the audienceasked why Li and his follow anti-Maoists did not want to mentionthe fact that it was not Mao but Liu Shaoqi who condemned Pengfirst in 1959 and then again in 1964, or that the latter wanted to plotwith the Russians so that a Chinese coup similar to that in Russiawould take place. Li was also asked why he did not want to mentionthe fact that both General Su Yu and Zhang Qian made the explosiveclaim that the Russian ambassador to China approached the thenChinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi about such a coup,5 and that ZhangWentian and Kang Sheng claimed that Peng actually said that ‘Russ-ian soldiers should be invited’ to solve China’s problem.6 For once Liwas lost for words (He Yuan 2007).

Challenging the late-Mao thesis

Dai Yugong (2006) confronts the late-Mao thesis head on. He arguesthat the practice and ideas of the later Mao are more valuable totoday’s China than those of the early Mao. Along these lines a widelycirculated e-media piece cleverly titled ‘Mao’s Commentaries on theCurrent Affairs in China’ (Wuyou zhixiang 2006) uses Mao’s words tocomment on some of the salient social developments in post-MaoChina. In the area of education the blatant disregard for the educationopportunities of the majority and single-minded concentration ofresources on the privileged few in post-Mao China has attracted mostcriticism by the e-media participants. There is discussion of the privi-leges of students in the so-called key schools, who enjoy the latestcomputers, piano rooms and sports centres in stark contrast to the situ-ation in rural China where the poor cannot afford even a simpletextbook in the twenty-first century, and in that context Mao’s directiveon 14 June 1952 that guizu xuexiao (aristocratic schools) should be abol-ished is cited. The issue of study methods is raised – the way thatstudents at school are fed too much book knowledge, and that theworkload demanded from them is too heavy – and Mao’s comment on21 December 1965 is cited, in which he warned that the educationalsystem did not teach much that was useful, that the way so much bookknowledge was used and the way discipline was imposed damagedstudents’ health; that is exactly what has been happening since the endof the Cultural Revolution.

The practice of maintaining well-resourced schools for the politicaland intellectual elite started in the early 1950s. After the disaster of the


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Great Leap Forward, with the support of Liu Shaoqi and DengXiaoping, the ideology and practice of developing key schools for thechildren of the elite in the name of training experts for economicconstruction became even more dominant. In all major urban centresthe sons and daughters (princelings) of high-ranking party officialsand army officers attended special schools where a few academic highachievers were also enrolled. While the princelings thought they werethe natural inheritors of the country and therefore entitled to the priv-ilege, the academic high achievers from the non-politically correctclasses felt alienated and resentful. In fact it was in those schools thatthe precursor of the Cultural Revolution took place: the line was drawnbetween students of the ‘red’ family background (the princelings) andthose from ‘black’ family background (families of ‘enemy’ classes). Asa result of the Cultural Revolution policies key schools were abolishedand there were experiments with a fairer system and a more practicalcurriculum. However, as soon as Deng Xiaoping came back to powerin the late 1970s the system of key schools was re-established.

Mao’s famous criticism on 26 June 1965 of the Ministry of Health iscited to remind readers of the current dismal situation of healthcare inChina. In that criticism Mao pointed out that most Chinese lived inrural China but the country’s healthcare system was designed to caterfor the urban population that comprised only 15 per cent of the total.Mao caustically suggested that the Ministry of Health should berenamed as the Ministry for the Urban Lords. To reverse the situationsome medical personnel from the urban centres were either encour-aged or forced to move to rural areas, while an affordable but effective‘barefoot doctor’ system was established. When Deng Xiaoping cameback to power in the later 1970s, the policy was again reversed.

Reminding the reader that television programmes nowadays aremostly about emperors, ghosts, sex or the rich and the famous, Mao’scriticism of the direction of literature and arts in 1963 is cited, in whichMao said the many arts and literature departments were ruled by thedead. Along the lines laid down in his talk on the literature and arts atthe Yan’an Forum in 1942, Mao wanted literature and arts to changedirection so that the work and life of the workers and farmers whowere the producers of food and daily necessities and bearers of a livedculture became their main subjects.

Another comment by Mao is particularly relevant to the issue ofland seizure and the dismantling of people’s homes for developmentsince the 1990s. On 15 November 1956, commenting on the localprotest against removing residents for an airport construction inHenan, Mao told the then General Secretary of the CCP DengXiaoping, who ran day-to-day affairs, that ‘even a bird needs a nest.How can you force people to move without consultation and without


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proper settlement?’ Mao demolished Deng Xiaoping by saying to himthat ‘you Deng Xiaoping also had a nest and what you would do ifyour nest was destroyed?’ Mao even said: ‘I welcome the fact that themasses threw stones and waved their hoes as protest.’

This is one of the strategies that e-media participants employ tocounter the demonization of the late-Mao era: expose what has gonewrong in the post-Mao era. Another such effort was made by Ping Gu(2006), who laments the fact that post-Mao China has broken elevenworld records for bad governance.7 Among these eleven are: the worsthealthcare in terms of fairness; the most expensive tertiary educationin terms of purchasing power parity; the greatest disparity between therural and urban; the worst environmental sustainability; the mostpolluted country; the country most prone to mining accidents; thecountry with the highest number of suicides; the most expensivebureaucracy; the highest number of death penalties; and the highestabsolute numbers of illiterate or semi-illiterate adults. Some of theseworld firsts were of course the same as in the Mao era, such as the highrate of illiteracy in absolute terms, for the simple reason of China’slarge population base. But fairness in healthcare, affordable of educa-tion for the majority, mining and work safety, the cost of bureaucracyand levels of inequality were evidently better during the Mao era,especially during the late-Mao years.

Challenging Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

As soon as Mao: The Untold Story appeared in English there was a fiercedebate in the e-media in Chinese. Unlike reviews in the West themajority of the e-media participants were critical of Chang and Hall-iday. One commentator says that the book takes the venerable Chinesehistoriographic approach to its extremity and the result was a moraltale. It is like the new Romance of Three Kingdom (Sannong Zhongguo2006). Even Zhang Lifan, son of Zhang Naiqi, who was one of the threemost prominent victimized Rightists, could not help but join the criti-cism of the book. Zhang fully supports Chang’s political stand, but hasto acknowledge that it is a pity that Chang wrote a fiction instead of ahistory, a mistake that misses the chance of throwing Mao into ‘therubbish dump of history’.

Another widely circulated critique of Chang is by a self-proclaimedscience student in the UK, Jin Xiaoding. As discussed in Chapter 4, Jindoes not have to examine documentary evidence to point out thelogical contractions in the Chang and Halliday book. When Jin’s 17questions were post in the e-media, Chang’s brother Zhang Pu partic-ipated in the debate on behalf of his sister. However, his defence is seenas a dismal failure by the e-media participants since he did not come


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up with any convincing response. In another contribution to repudiatethe Chang and Halliday claim that the famous Luding Bridge Battlebetween the Red Army and the Nationalists did not take place duringthe Long March, an interview with a veteran solider Tang Jinxin (2007),who is 91 years old and who describes how he participated in the fiercebattle of Luding, is circulated in the e-media.

Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and the Great Leap Forward

One important aspect of evaluating Mao has to do with how Maohandled Peng Dehuai’s criticism of the Great Leap Forward at theLushan Conference in 1959. The version of the event that is mostwidely accepted is the one offered by Li Rui, according to which Maonot only took action to topple Peng but also used the opportunity tofurther implant reckless leftist policies that precipitated the famine.However, recently there have been a number of contributions on theWuyou zhixiang (Utopia) website that try to revaluate the event. WuLengxi (2007) and Zhang Hengzhi (2007) have presented evidence andarguments that 1) for six months before the Lushan Conference startedin 2 July 1959 Mao made continuous efforts to cool down the GreatLeap hype, 2) the purpose of the Lushan Conference was to improvethe situation, 3) initially Mao did not take too much notice of Peng’sletter of criticism and intended to conclude the conference as plannedin spite of Peng’s letter, and 4) it was some other CCP leaders whoargued and persuaded Mao to extend the conference to ‘struggleagainst Peng’.

Yun, quoting Liu Shaoqi’s speeches, argues that it was Liu whohunted Peng down by accusing Peng of aiming to usurp power fromthe party. Liu specifically referred to Peng as a leading member of theGao Gang and Rao Shushi anti-party clique, an accusation with whichZhou Enlai concurred (the ‘anti-party clique’ refers to the event in 1955when the Gao Gang and Rao Shushi launched a campaign to reshufflethe CCP top leadership to replace Liu and his lieutenants). Liu alsoaccused Peng of working with ‘foreign influence’, referring to Peng’svisits to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe immediately before theLushan Conference.

Wu confirms that during the Politburo meeting in Beijing on 12 to 13June 1959, Mao criticized himself for the recklessness of the Great LeapForward policies and admitted that Chen Yun had been right after all tobe cautious. Wu recalls that Mao’s personal secretary Tian Jiaying waspleased that Mao made self-criticism and thought that it was then up tothe party secretaries of various provinces to make self-criticisms at theplanned Lushan Conference. When Peng’s letter was circulated, WuLengxi, Hu Qiaomu and Tian Jiaying all thought there was nothing


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particularly controversial about it. Except for one single reference tobourgeois fanaticism, Peng’s letter was not even as sharply critical of theGreat Leap Forward as the conference resolution that the three of themhad been instructed to draft. After a private conversation with Mao, TianJiaying was convinced that Mao was forced to agree to criticize Peng bythe argument that if nothing was done the revolutionary left might aswell be disbanded (zuopai jiu yao sanhuo le).

Zhang Hengzhi (2007) goes even further. He argues that it was LiuShaoqi and his lieutenants who encouraged the Great Leap radicalismand Mao was the cautious one. But Mao was ready to shoulder theresponsibility when the mistakes became obvious since Mao he notwant to damp the revolutionary spirit of the radicals. Zhang furtherargues, by quoting Liu Shaoqi, that Peng’s letter was directed at Liu.The fight between Liu and Peng left Mao with little choice: Liu hadonly recently been made Mao’s official successor, and if he sided withPeng then the CCP would split. It was Liu who wanted to get rid ofPeng and it was Liu who said in 1961 that anyone could be rehabili-tated except Peng. It was Liu who said that Peng, like Wei Yan,8 had atreacherous bone (fan gu), that he had the character of Zhukov (theRussian general whose role was crucial in Khrushchev’s coup) and thehypocritical style of Feng Yuxiang.9 Mao was drawn into the Pengaffair reluctantly and that was why Mao said on 24 October 1966 thatDeng Xiaoping had never come to seek advice from him since 1959,and that he was not happy with the August 1959 Lushan Conferencebecause the outcome was pushed through entirely by Liu and Dengand he was given no choice.

According to Zhong Yanlin (2006), Deng Xiaoping was at leastinitially very enthusiastic in promoting the Great Leap Forward. Forinstance when the leadership inside Henan Province was split on thespeed of economic development at the beginning of Great LeapForward, Deng Xiaoping, as the General Secretary of the CCP,supported the radical Wu Zhipu, the party boss of Henan, by sayingthat Wu was on the side of truth (Xu Ming 1998). Deng also protectedLi Jingquan, the party boss of Sichuan province (Zhang Suhua 2006),from any punishment when the Great Leap Forward disaster wasrevealed. Henan and Sichuan were two of the three provinces worst hitby the famine. As Zhang Suhua (2006) points out, Deng headed theoffice of the General Secretariat of the CCP that had carried out theday-to-day instructions of the CCP and therefore was directly in chargeof putting the Great Leap Forward policies into practice. Thereforewhat Deng believed and wanted to be done must have made greatdifferences. For instance on 5 September 1958, Deng’s office issued atelephone conference decree instructing every level of party authoritiesto meet the quota targets for iron and steel production. The instruction


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was so specific and strict that the wording was: ‘不但一吨不能少，少一斤也不行’ (not a ton less of production is allowed, not even a halfkilogram less). When Deng toured the northeast in September 1958, hemade several passionate and rousing speeches to encourage GreatLeap Forward policies and to praise the newly established communesystem. Finally, though Deng did not participate in the LushanConference to attack Peng he did publish an opinion piece in the CCPmouthpiece Red Flag criticizing Peng and singing the praise of theGreat Leap Forward policies (Zhong Yanlin 2006).

Debates on issues related to the Cultural Revolution

In previous chapters, I have argued that Chinese memoirs, autobiogra-phies and biographies either assume or argue that Mao’s motivationfor the Cultural Revolution was a personal power struggle. All devel-opments subsequent to the downfall of Liu Shaoqi were more or lessexplained by this power struggle thesis. Along these lines, thecampaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius in the early 1970s, forinstance, is said to be Mao’s scheme to overthrow Zhou Enlai.However, e-media participants have begun to question the powerstruggle thesis. In an article published in the e-media, Xiao Yu (2000)quotes Fan Daren, one of the important polemics writers during theabove-mentioned campaign, to dispute the claim that the criticism ofLin Biao and Confucius had anything to do with Mao’s intention totarget Zhou Enlai. Fan, the main writer in the team writing under thepen-name of liangxiao (two universities), which consisted of academicsfrom the two top universities of Beijing and Qinghua, testifies that thewriters in the team did not intend to criticize Zhou Enlai when theywere writing articles to criticize Confucianism, that they were not toldto do so, nor was it even hinted that they should.

Disagreement between Mao and Liu Shaoqi: the two-linestruggle thesis

Because of the proclaimed ‘end of history’ and beginning of an new eraof clashes of civilizations, the intellectual consensus all over the worldseems to be that not only should the Russian and Chinese Revolutionsbe jettisoned but that even the idea of revolution should be buried.This global intellectual climate change has been so convincinglypersuasive that the two-line struggle thesis that was offered as therationale for the origin of the Cultural Revolution has been consideredlargely discredited. The dispute between Liu and Mao is seen aslargely a personal power struggle. However, e-media participants inChina want to bring the issue of the two-line struggle back.


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The gist of the two-lines struggle is this: not long after the Chineseeconomy had recovered from the Great Leap Forward there were rivallines of thought within the CCP on China’s future development. Oneline of thought was advocated by Liu Shaoqi, Chairman of the State,and the other by Mao, the Chairman of the CCP, the ruling communistparty.

By the early 1960s Liu did not seem to object to the idea that some-thing had to be done in China or protests and turmoil against the CCPsimilar to those in Hungary and Czechoslovakia would occur.However, the two chairmen had completely different views on whatthe problems were and what measures to take. The Liu line of thoughtsaw the problem organizationally as CCP grassroots corruption byelements from outside the party. The Mao line, however, saw theproblem as being ideologically inside the party. Liu was of the idea thatthe communist cadres at grassroots level in rural China were eitherbribed by the former landlords or corrupted by capitalist thoughts ofcomfort, pleasure and greed. Therefore measures had to be taken touncover the embezzling and corrupted cadres. Moreover, those meas-ures should be imposed from top to bottom and from outside forcesorganizationally to wipe out these elements of corruption. In contrast,the Mao line of thought was that the majority of the grassroots cadreswere either innocent or just following policies from above. Corruptionand embezzlement were just symptoms of a deeper problem ofideology, the ideology of capitalist values and beliefs. To change theideology fundamentally, measures had to be taken to correct thoseinside the party who made the policies. For Mao the organizationalmeasure of dismissal or punishment of this and that cadre at grassrootslevel would not solve the root problem. The fundamental solution hadto come from changes of values and beliefs, and those changesrequired a cultural revolution. Hence the idea of the Cultural Revolu-tion was developed. The above is only a sketch of the two-line struggle;a more detailed explication and articulation can be seen in Wang Li(2001), one of the chief radicals who interpreted Mao’s ideas during thebeginning of the Cultural Revolution.10

In what follows next I will present a brief case study of how the two-line struggle developed between Mao and Liu during 1964–65. Thiscase is presented here along the lines of Ming Mu (2007), whichappeared on Zhurengong website. In the e-media debates most of theparticipants do not sign their real names and I believe Ming Mu is apseudonym. I cite this source as an example because I find it totallyconvincing and Ming Mu, unlike other e-media debates participants,cites documentary sources such as Bo Yibo (1997), Feng Xianzhi (1996),Liu’s letter to Mao, Liu and Mao’s speeches as well as records of thecentral committee of the CCP work conferences.


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In order to prevent what was perceived to have happened in theformer Soviet Union, Mao decided to carry out what was called theSocialist Education Movement and Liu was put in charge of this. InNovember 1963 Liu sent his wife, Wang Guangmei, to the Tao YuanBrigade of Hebei province to do a pilot project on Socialist Educationin rural China. In June 1964 Liu took a work tour in Hebei, Shanghai,Henan, Shandong and Anhui, promoting his wife’s work in what wascalled the Tao Yuan Experiment. Liu asserted that Wang Guangmei’spilot project showed grassroots organization in rural China wascompletely rotten, either corrupted or changed politically to be on theside of class enemies: the landlords, rich peasants and counter-revolu-tionaries. Liu ordered all senior party officials to carry outinvestigations like Wang by staying in one village for a long period oftime (the Chinese term is 蹲点 dun dian). Liu shocked his attentiveaudience when he forcefully told them that those who did not dun dianwould not be qualified to be members of the CCP central committee.He also added that Mao’s work should not be taken as dogma, thatMao’s investigative method of group interviews was out of date andthat a new way of encamping in a village to establish contacts (zhagenchuanlian) was required.

Mao’s idea was totally different however. He thought that the major-ity of grassroots cadres should not be the targets of struggle and thatparachuting in so many people from the outside to one place to carry outstruggle was politically wrong and technically impossible: it was wrongpolitically because the assumption was that the local people could not betrusted. It was technically impossible because there was no way in whichresources could be mobilized to carry out the task for the whole country.When Mao’s personal secretary Tian Jiaying, on Mao’s instructions,conveyed the two points to Liu, Liu frowned and said nothing. Thoughhe was not very keen on the Tao Yuan Experiment, Mao initially agreedto make the Wang Guangmei Report a CCP document for circulation, asLiu recommended. However, he soon changed his mind and ordered thewithdrawal of the Report. According to Wang Li (2001), this was mainlybecause Jiang Qing had reported Liu’s work-tour speech to Mao bysaying: ‘Liu is already criticizing you when you are still alive, whereasKhrushchev made the secret report denouncing Stalin only when thelatter was dead.’ However, Wang Li admits that he interpreted Mao’schange of mind in that way only because that was what Jiang Qing hadtold him. He also admits that Mao changed his mind after consultingother provincial leaders such as Li Xuefeng, Wu Lanfu, Tao Lujia and LiuZihou.

To carry out the struggle against grassroots cadres, Liu sent workteams totalling 15,000 people from outside into the county of Xincheng,which had a population of less than 300,000. Mao asked Liu: how could


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such vast human resources be mobilized to carry out Socialist Educationin the whole country if so many people were required for one county?However, the disagreement about the methods of conducting SocialistEducation was not the real issue, as Yang Shangkun realized and notedin his diaries (Yang 2001). The real issue was that Mao and Liu had acompletely different attitude towards the so-called masses. Mao’s viewwas that the Socialist Education Movement should not be carried out byoutsiders. It should be carried out by the masses themselves locally andthe party should rely on the local masses. He said that those who embez-zled a couple of hundred Chinese dollars (according to the statistics inthe Wang Guangmei Report, most of the accused cadres were accused ofmisappropriating this amount of money less) should not be taken asclass enemies. So long as they admitted their mistakes and repaid themoney they should allowed to work again, Mao said. Mao’s idea wasthat only the very few top leaders of any organization should be thetarget of socialist education and education should be conducted by themembers of that organization.

In Mao’s opinion, Liu’s method would strike against the broadsector at grassroots level in order to protect the small group of leadingofficials (the Chinese term is 打击一大片保护一小撮). Mao furtherrebuked Liu by saying that the Socialist Education Movement shouldnot be about money and corruption but about a broad ideology ofsocialism versus capitalism. Unlike Liu, who still thought that the classstruggle in China was between the communists and old class enemiesof landlords and capitalists, Mao believed that nature of class strugglehad changed after the communist victory, that the old categories ofclass enemy were toothless and that there was a new class that wasputting the revolution in danger. Mao’s line of thought was that thedanger of China turning into capitalist state did not lie with the broadmasses at grassroots but with leaders inside the party who could takeChina onto a capitalist road, hence the term of ‘capitalist roaders’ thatwas used during the Cultural Revolution.

After the disagreement between Mao and Liu over the aims andmeasures of the Socialist Education Movement surfaced, some seniorleaders asked Liu to make a self-criticism to Mao and to others of thecentral leadership and Liu did. But Liu’s humiliating climb-downdelayed the final confrontation only for a year. In 1966, Mao launchedhis attack on the ‘wrong’ ideological line in cultural and educationalspheres, because according to him, a cultural revolution carried out bythe broad sector of the masses was the only way to regenerate the Party(Wang Li 2001). On the other hand, events proved that Liu either wasincapable of understanding, or refused to understand Mao’s line ofthought. When the Cultural Revolution started to unfold, Liu, being incharge of the day-to-day work, again sent work teams formed by


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personnel seconded from various party organs into schools anduniversities in Beijing. The work teams then started to strike againstthe broad sector of the masses of old categories of class enemies. As aresult hundreds and hundreds of students and teachers in BeijingUniversity alone were targeted as class enemies and counter-revolu-tionaries. Some were put under house arrest and others were paradedin struggle meetings. Mao was angry and again accused Liu of strikingagainst the broad sector in order to protect the small group of leadingofficials, and of being the leader of a reactionary line; Liu thus becameone of the main targets of the Cultural Revolution.

According to Wang Li, Mao only wanted to get the CCP on the rightideological line and did not want to get at Liu Shaoqi personally.Initially, Mao still wanted to keep Liu within the CCP, but also wantedhim and other leaders to go through the process of an ideologicalstruggle so as to regenerate the party. When Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaopingand Tao Zhu (and many others) had been officially deposed fromoffice, Mao said ‘down with (da dao) only for a year, at most two years’.He also stressed that if there was a war (with the Soviet Union, Taiwanor the United States in mind at that time) these people should berestored to their former positions straightaway (Wang Li 2001: 681).Towards the end of 1966, however, Mao realized that those whoresisted his ideological line were many and very strong. But he saidthat he was determined to carry the Cultural Revolution through to theend and said to Wang Li and his Cultural Revolution radical comradesthat ‘if they shoot you I will go with you’ (Wang Li 2001: 710). Wang Liand others present at this conversation were shocked by Mao’sremarks and Wang did not realize what Mao meant until many yearslater.

Other unofficial views of the Cultural Revolution

Also circulated in the e-media (Shui 2006) is the report of a workshoporganized and participated in by some high-ranking retired party offi-cials on 13–15 May 2006, which evaluates the Cultural Revolutionpositively and challenges the post-Mao version of events. This wasunprecedented in a number of ways: first because no such workshophad ever been heard of in China before; and second, because it wasreported in the e-media for all to read. Important views expressed atthis workshop include:

• It is necessary to draw a distinction between Rebels and RedGuards – the former were supported by Mao to target ‘capitalistroaders’ inside the party while the latter were actually followedthe party bureaucrats in ideology and political line.


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• In Deng’s crusade of denigrating the Cultural Revolution,members of the intellectual elite such as Ji Xianlin, Ba Jin, YeYonglie and Yan Jiaqi constructed a ‘cultural blockade’ against theRebels and made the Rebels appear to be responsible for thedestruction and victimization that was initially done by the RedGuards and then by office holders inside the party.11

• The Rebels treated the party officials humanely in their ideologicalfight.

• Mao did not intend to suppress all of the party officials, butwanted them to go through the experience of learning from themasses before they were allowed back into office (as testified byWang Li (2001) who avers that Mao said to him personally severaltimes that even Liu should be allowed to be a member of the CCPCentral Committee).

• Even at the height of struggle against ‘capitalist roaders’, therewere always instructions that the people who were targets ofstruggle had to be physically protected and well fed.

• Most of the so-called armed fighting was not factional fightingamong Rebels but oppression of Rebels by party officials.

• Most of the important party officials were called to Beijing forprotection after a few struggle sessions and many others cameback to power within two years.

• In the revolutionary committees that were set up during theCultural Revolution, the army representatives never took the Rebelrepresentatives seriously.

• Only in Shanghai was the situation a little better for the Rebelsbecause the Rebels had direct support from the centre.

• The army was strongly against the Rebels.• Mao’s Cultural Revolution strategy was forced upon him after all

other efforts failed.• Mao was hesitant during the Cultural Revolution, but thought that

the cadres could be made to change their attitude by a mobilizationof the masses.

• The enemies of the CCP, like the landlords, capitalists and Nation-alist officials and officers, were pardoned, but the Rebels were stilltreated as enemies of humanity

Sea change of attitudes

These views are contrary to the official verdict as well as the mainstreamviews and would not be allowed to appear in conventional media inChina. These contrary narratives reflect a sea change of attitudes among


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the broad masses of people. The process of attitude change, as seen forinstance in the case of Yang Fan, reflect a lot of what has been happen-ing in terms of understanding the Cultural Revolution unofficially. Yangwent to kindergarten, primary school and secondary school with LiuYuan and Bo Xicheng.12 The three of them, according to Yang (2006),went through a stage of fierce denunciation of the Cultural Revolution.But now they have reached the stage where they, notably Liu Yuan andBo Xicheng, do not hate Mao for what happened, but see the CulturalRevolution as failed idealism. Yang thinks that there are positive lessonsto be learned from the Cultural Revolution.

Wang Xizhe the dissident

Wang Xizhe was a one of the famous co-authors of the Li Yizhe Posters(a pamphlet criticizing the Cultural Revolution and the problems ofthe Chinese political system that was circulated widely in the early1970s) and is now a dissident in exile. Wang, however, still holds theview that the Cultural Revolution led to some positive ideas anddemocratic practices. In this respect he is in disagreement with otherChinese dissidents. In one widely circulated piece, Wang (2006a) asksthe dissident Lin Feng, ‘Since we dissidents are supposed to opposewhatever is proposed by the CCP and support whatever is opposed bythe CCP, why do you support the CCP when it denigrates the CulturalRevolution?’ (for the dissidents’ Two whateverisms see Chapter 2).Wang (2006b) also rebuts Han Zhu who asserts that the Cultural Revo-lution was a populist Nazi movement. Wang should know because hewas first very active in Cultural Revolution activities and then wroteone of the most articulate critiques of many aspects of the CulturalRevolution’s developments.

Kong Qingdong and the cowshed

‘Cowshed’ is a term used by the Chinese to refer to a practice duringthe Cultural Revolution when ‘the bad elements’ or niu gui she shen(cow demons and snake ghosts, a traditional Chinese term referring tofolk tales about bad spirits that would do harm to the innocent andweak) were sent to a camp to work and study in order to change theirmentality. The camp is then termed niu peng, a shed for ‘the Cowdemons’. Kong is an outspoken academic but very critical of the factthat condemnation of niu peng (the cowshed) in memoirs has become afashion, similar to the Mao-era fashion of yi ku si tian (to recall thebitterness of the pre-1949 life and to tell of the sweet life of today).Nowadays, niu peng is portrayed as more horrifying than prison.However, Kong (2006) argues that much of what happened at that time


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was just xuexi ban (a study class). To rebut the accepted wisdom thateverything that took place during the Cultural Revolution was bad,Kong talks about how his father was put into one of these niu pengbecause he was accused of carrying a false CCP membership card.Kong recalls that the niu peng was not something that was terrible atall. In fact his father took his six-year-old son with him at Kong’s owninsistence and there they had a good time, with better food than athome and a lot of collective activities. They did not have to work andit was much like attending a university or school: studying, watchingfilms and sleeping. Or more aptly for Kong, it was like a summercamping holiday.

Memoirs of different narratives

There are also attempts to write memoirs of the Cultural Revolutionthat present different memories from those prevalent in the conven-tionally published literature. One that has been circulated widely in thee-media is Lao Tian’s oral history of the Cultural Revolution inChongqing. This oral history raises some important points such as thatthe Red Guards or Rebel groups that defended the established powerholders were not persecuted, even though they might have committedgreater violence and destruction, and that the February 1967 suppres-sion of the Rebels, directed by the powerful Marshal Ye Jianying, led totens of thousands of victims in Sichuan alone. This oral history showsthat even with Mao and the Cultural Revolution radicals’ support inBeijing the Rebels were constantly suppressed at grassroots levelbecause the army supported the old power holders. Even after theestablishment of the revolutionary committee that included Rebelrepresentatives, the management of the day-to-day affairs was still inthe hands of the old bureaucrats. Furthermore, the Rebels had no legit-imacy in criticizing anyone unless they were either supported fromabove or locally by the army, and despite Mao’s appeal for leniency onbehalf of the Rebels, Rebel leaders were time and again detained orjailed or put under house arrest. In one case even Zhou Enlai andMao’s personal intervention did not help one Rebel leader. These arerevealing and astonishing details that demand new research and newtheoretical approaches towards the history of the Cultural Revolution.

Challenging Wang Youqin

Wang Youqin, a Chinese expatriate now residing in the United States,has become some kind of celebrated expert in archiving assaults onteachers by students during the Cultural Revolution. Wang, for instance,blames the Red Guards for the death of a teacher, Bian Zhongyun, in


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Beijing at the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Ma Beiming(2006, 2007a and 2007b), a well-known name in the e-media, however,challenges this. Ma argues that the death of Bian Zhongyun (the firstcasualty of the Cultural Revolution) might not have been caused by RedGuards for political reasons but for personal reasons. On another occa-sion Ma also points out that as soon as Song Bingbing (one of the chiefRed Guards) and six of her classmates saw that Bian’s life was in dangerthey organized rescue activities to save his life, including upbraidinghospital staff for hesitation. Ma further points out that Wang Youqin notonly withdrew this piece of information when she wrote about the deathof Bian but also accused Song of being principally responsible for Bian’sdeath (Ma 2007a), an accusation that Song denied in The Morning Sun, acritically acclaimed documentary on the Cultural Revolution made byCarma Hinton.

Conclusion: the question of truth

With limited evidence and because of the lack of references in Ma’spapers I cannot make a judgement of the dispute between Wang andMa. It is important, of course, that a judgement is made because thatultimately brings us to the question of truth and which version tobelieve. But the dispute about the case of Bian does indicate that truthis never simply black and white. What is important for the purpose ofthis book is to show that no claims can be made without being chal-lenged these days, and increasingly these challenges are arguing infavour of the Mao era.

It is also important to realize that what is believed to be true isalways based on what is available, factually true or otherwise. Humanbeings can believe something to be true for many years, generations oreven centuries before the so-called truth is debunked. Thereforeanother aim of this book is to show that the e-media have producedevidence, arguments and views that are different from those repre-sented in the conventional media available to many readers. Quitelikely, this readership is bigger than the readership of refereed journalarticles and reputable published books, or even the conventionalmedia. In this sense whether a particular claim is factually truebecomes less significant. What is significant is that counter-knowledgeis being produced and another truth is manufactured.


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8 Challenging the hegemony:contrary narratives in the e-media (II) – the Mao era

Introduction: history in socioeconomic context

One of the easily accepted arguments in attacking Mao the man is thathe was a person of no original ideas, whose dark political manoeu-vring was simply aimed at gaining and maintaining personal power.Looking from a perspective of this power struggle thesis, all the costsand victimizations on the trail of Mao’s political action were not onlysenseless and distasteful but actually evil. In Chapter 7 I have focusedon how e-media participants challenge this accepted evaluation of Maothe man and some issues related to the Cultural Revolution. Oneattempt in challenging the power struggle thesis is to bring the two-line struggle thesis back into the big picture. I find the two-linestruggle thesis very convincing and believable because it fits more withdocumentary evidence and because it has more explanatory power inrevealing the behaviour of the actors both at the top and at the lowerlevels at the time. It is more convincing and believable also because itinvolves politico-socioeconomic history instead of personal intriguesat Mao’s court. In this chapter we will see how e-media participantschallenge the mainstream wisdom on the Mao era by relating to the bigpictures of political, social and economic issues.

The state of the economy in the Mao era and during theCultural Revolution

Ever since the arrest of the Cultural Revolution radicals immediatelyafter the death of Mao in 1976 (so immediate that Jiang Qing is report-edly to have protested that Mao was being betrayed when his deadbody was still warm), there has been manufacturing of claims to showthat Mao did not know and furthermore did not care about China’seconomy, that the Gang of Four deliberately wanted to destroy China’seconomy and that towards the end of the Cultural Revolution theChinese economy was on the brink of collapse.

Deng Xiaoping was the architect of the fabrication of this truth.Deng (2007) claimed that the Cultural Revolution held China up(danwu) for ten years and that for 20 years after 1957 China politically

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was in a chaotic situation (hunluan zhuangtai) while its economyremained slow and stagnant (huanman he tingchi). Recently, many e-media participants have made strenuous efforts to counter what theyconsider the groundless demonization of Mao, the Cultural Revolutionand the Mao era.

The existing literature

To combat the Deng line of denigrating the Mao era, several strategieshave been employed by e-media participants. One strategy is to trans-late and circulate the existing literature that has either been ignored ormade unavailable to the Chinese audience. Two examples stand out inthis case. One is the extraction of materials concerning China’seconomy in Meisner’s (1986) defence of the Mao era. Meisner’s carefularray of statistics and analysis provide a convincing argument thatChina’s economy performance during the Mao era in general and theCultural Revolution in particular was better than that of the averagethird-world country. His defence of Mao and the Chinese economyunder his leadership appears and reappears on various e-media in itsChinese version.

In this regard it is worth pointing out that Hinton’s criticism of thepost-Mao reform and his re-reflections of the Cultural Revolutiontranslated by David Pugh, first posted on Zhongguo gongren wang (TheChinese Workers Website), is also circulated widely.1

As another example of the strategy of pasting and re-pasting exist-ing materials in the e-media, in www.creaders.org forum, Lesson(2006) pastes a ten-page piece detailing the economic achievementsduring the period of the Cultural Revolution. Here he quotes HanDeqiang’s ‘zhong wai duibi wushi nian’ (China in comparison withforeign countries in the past 50 years) to show that from 1965 to 1985the average annual GDP growth rate of the United States was 1.34 percent, UK 1.6 per cent, West Germany 2.7 per cent, Japan 4.7 per cent,Singapore 7.6 per cent, South Korea 6.6 per cent, Hong Kong 6.1 percent and India 1.7 per cent (Han Deqiang 2006). During the sameperiod (the collective system was not totally dismantled until themid-1980s) China’s growth rate was 7.49 per cent.

Responses to three responses

There are three common responses to this strategy. One is to claim thatthe economic growth rate during the Mao era was not that impressivesince China’s economy was so backward to start with, and it is anaccepted wisdom that the growth rate is usually high when aneconomy starts from a low base. This response actually confirms that


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PRC took over a legacy of backward economy and the era of Mao maderapid progress.

The second response is to claim that statistics based on informa-tion provided by the Chinese authorities are not reliable. Thisresponse however shows a lack of critical reflection in at least twoways. First, it was the post-Mao political and professional elite whohad conducted a comprehensive statistical evaluation. Those Chinesepolitical and professional elite who had been the victims of Mao’sCultural Revolution and other political movements had no reason toinflate statistics for the benefit of the Mao era but every motivation toshow the Mao era in negative light. Therefore, if anything the offi-cially sanctioned Chinese statistics are most likely to present a morenegative picture. Second, those who are critical of Mao and China’seconomic performance in the Mao era base their criticism on statisticswhich are also provided by the Chinese authorities. To claim that thestatistics from China are unreliable when they could render a positiveevaluation on the one hand but use statistics from the same sourcesto present a negative evaluation on the other is logically inconsistentand hypocritical.

The third response is represented by a respected professor, QinHui of Qinghua University, who argues that it is doubtful whetherthe kind of growth in the Mao era is anything worth talking about.Qin argues that India’s economic performance was as good as that ofChina without much human cost and that the Chinese economyduring the late 1920s and early 1930s of the Republic period was asgood as and even better than the Mao period (Zhong Lantai 2006).The underlying argument is that there could not have been, or cannotbe, better economic performance under a communist regime. This isthe reason why there has been so much debate and concern over thecomparison between China and India and an increasing trend ofpositive appraisal of the Republic period under Chiang Kai-shek.Amartya Sen’s famous thesis that democracy could prevent large-scale famine – famine usually is not really the result of shortage offood but the result of unaccountable governance – is constantly citedin this debate. However, as Chomsky (2000) points out, Sen’s otherthesis, that equity and equal rights to public goods are essential forthe well-being of people, is always ignored by the anti-Maoists. Senargued that compared with China’s rapid increase of life expectancyin the Mao era, the capitalist experiment in India could be said tohave caused an extra 4 million deaths a year since India’s independ-ence. That ‘India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with moreskeletons every eight years than China put there in its years ofshame, 1958–1961’ (Sen 2000) is an argument that academics like QinHui do not want to contemplate.

C H A L L E N G I N G T H E H E G E M O N Y I I

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Debates on comparisons

Ever since the 1980s a favourite argument of the anti-Maoists has beento compare China with the four Asian ‘tigers’ of Hong Kong, Taiwan,Singapore and South Korea so as to demonstrate the superiority ofmarket capitalism. Han Deqiang (Lesson 2006) argues that the fact thatpeople in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had ahigher living standard than the people in China should not be inter-preted as an indictment on the Chinese economy in the Mao era. Thefact that living standards were lower in China had more to do with theinternational environment of the cold war and to the necessity forChina to develop a basic industrial and national defence infrastruc-ture.2 Han argues that the post-Mao reforms of 20 years benefited fromachievements of the 30-year Mao era. The metaphor Han uses is thatthe progress in the 30 years of the Mao era was like riding a bike up ahill, and once at the top it is was a faster and easier ride downhill, forthe reform of 20 years.

Recently on the website Wuyou zhixiang (Utopia), there appeared apiece titled ‘Mao Zedong has changed the Chinese nation’ (Nong Nuji2006b). In this piece the author attacks the e-media activist Yu Fei whois nicknamed Yu Minzhu (Yu Democracy) because of his rhetoric. Nongattaches 18 tables and diagrams detailing the economic achievements ofthe Mao era, including one on the economic achievements during theGreat Leap Forward, one on the record of major economic events from1956 to 1976, one on industrial and one on agricultural outputs, one oninvestments, one on student numbers in education and one on personalincome, together with three attachments on different economic indexand growth rates among China, India and the United States of America.The data and statistics show that China’s economy during the Mao eranot only made great strides but also outperformed India.

The Great Leap Forward famine

That the Great Leap Forward resulted in a large-scale famine and thateven basic daily necessities such as soap and rice were rationed presenttwo powerful arguments that the economy in the Mao era was disas-trous. The Great Leap Forward has always been controversial and therehave been endless debates about the exact death toll of the famine. Manyof the e-media debate participants argue that the death toll has beengreatly exaggerated by the post-Mao regime. However, even the lowestestimate of several million deaths cannot gloss over the disaster.

One response to this from the contrary narratives has been to saythat famine had been frequent in Chinese history. To counter the argu-ment that it was during the Mao era that greatest toll from famine in


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all of history occurred, Jiang Chuangang (2006) lists how faminesoccurred frequently in the first half of the twentieth century in China,citing the famines from 1928 to 1930 in Gansu and Shaanxi when morethan 10 million are claimed to have died of starvation, or the 1936–37famine in Sichuan when cannibalism is claimed to have taken place, orthe 1942 famine that plagued central China and in which Henan’spopulation is claimed to have halved. Jiang also pointed out that,according to statistics compiled by the Information Service of theResearch Centre of China’s Population and Development, thepopulation of 1958, 1959, 1960 and 1961 was respectively 653,460,000,660,120,000, 662,070,000 and 664,570,000, with an increase of 11,100,000people in three years. Though the population increases of these yearswere lower than those during the years of 1956 to 1958, the increasewas still on average 5.46 per cent, higher than the world average at thattime, and much higher than pre-1949 years. Jiang further points outthat the death rate of 1959, 1960 and 1961 was 1.459 per cent, 1.791 percent and 1.424 per cent, an average of 1.558 per cent, which was aboutthe same as the world average death rate at that time, and much lowerthan the death rates in pre-1949 years. During the three years of famine30,952,300 people died, and compared with the lower death rate of11.40 per cent during 1956 to 1958, there were an extra 8.3 milliondeaths, not as many as the 30 to 40 million claimed by anti-communistliterature such as Chang and Halliday (2005).3

Li Xuanyuan is a heavyweight e-media participant in challengingthe anti-Maoist truth. Here is a brief case study of Liao Bokang by Lithat shows how anti-Maoist truth is manufactured. Liao Bokang waspromoted to important positions by the post-Mao authorities, servingas CCP party secretary of China’s largest city, Chongqing, andChairman of the Political Consultative Committee of Sichuan province.In 2004 Liao published an article in the Dangdai shi ziliao (Documenta-tion of Contemporary History) compiled by the Academy of SocialSciences of Sichuan province. In that article Liao claims that in Sichuanalone the death toll was 10 million (remember this is the provincewhere Jung Chang grew up, where her father served as the deputypropaganda chief of the province and yet Chang does not or cannotprovide any direct documentary evidence or witness account of thefamine death toll either in Wild Swans or Mao: The Unknown Story). Liaofurther claims that he was interviewed in 1962 by the then Secretary ofthe Communist Youth League Hu Yaobang, as well as by the Directorof the CCP Central Office Yang Shangkun, and reported the 10 millionfamine death toll in Sichuan to them. When questioned by Yang aboutevidence of the figure of 10 million Liao said that the figure was froma Sichuan provincial document. Yang was surprised that he did notknow of such a document since every provincial document had to pass


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through him. It turned out that what Liao meant was that there was aSichuan province document that recorded that there were a total 62.36million people in Sichuan in 1960. Liao then explained that the deathtoll must be 10 million since the total 1957 population as shown by theannual state statistics was 72.157 million. Li Xuanyuan (2007) then asksthree questions: 1) how do the 72.157 million figures come about? 2)Can one arrive at a 10-million famine death toll by just taking awayone year’s figures from those of another? 3) Why did Liao wait until2004 when both Hu Yaobang and Yang Shangkun were safely dead toreveal such important meetings?

Li then provides two instances of demographic movement from hispersonal experience (Li is also from Sichuan province) that may explainsome of the demographic change. These instances of demographicmovements have hardly been noticed or studied by scholars of the issue.One instance is a personal move that was not accounted for in officialstatistics. Because of starvation the husband of Li’s older sister left hisvillage in 1959 and moved to Tianchi coal mine to work as a miner.Because he left without permission, his village cancelled his householdregistration. He registered as a rural person when he came back to thevillage in 1963. This is an example of one person missing during thefamine years but one person more on the official records afterwards.

Another instance is that there were officially sanctioned move-ments. When the Great Leap Forward started there was greatexpansion of local enterprises and industrial decentralization. In theprocess millions of rural people were enrolled into the industrialsector. When the famine began to take effect the Chinese authorities, atChen Yun’s suggestion, repatriated those workers. This movementcreated a situation in which some people appeared to have disap-peared from rural areas during the Great Leap Forward but thenreappeared as rural residents. Furthermore, this sudden movementand then a sudden repatriation in a matter of three or four years of somany millions of people inevitably created problems for records evenif there had been a good statistics collection system. But, as everyonein and outside China agrees, there was no such system. Li, again,provides a personal experience of this demographic change. In GaoVillage where the total population was not more than 200 at that timethere was an inflow of a family of four repatriated from Jingdezhen(Gao 1999a).

Food shortage and a metaphor

The main argument presented by Lao Tian (2006a) and others about therationing of food highlights the difference between the strategy ofnational consumption and that of national accumulation. A metaphorical


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argument that is widely circulated in the e-media is that there is a differ-ence between xi panzi (washing dishes) and jiao xuefei (paying tuition feesto study). The author of this argument starts with a well-knownphenomenon that many PRC Chinese students, when in an affluentWestern country, would rather wash dishes in a restaurant than studybecause the immediate cash income is too tempting, especially whencompared with wages they could earn in China. Those who wash dishescan earn and save enough money to buy a car (a luxury item in China)and even eventually a house. This is consumer culture. However theother approach is to save and borrow to pay tuition fees to pursue acourse of study. This would mean many years of hard work and of littleconsumption. The end result is totally different: those who study willeventually end up with a higher social status. This metaphorical compar-ison is used to argue that during the Mao era the Chinese had to workhard but to consume little (like someone paying tuition fees) so thateventually China could manage to build up an industrial and economicbase to become the equal of the great global powers. The post-Mao strat-egy is like washing dishes to earn money to consume: China is now anassembly line of the world, or a gigantic low-technology migrant worker.

The four modern inventions

Participants in the e-media debate constantly remind their readers thatpost-Mao China has hardly made any technological advance, and that allof China’s important industries that were built up during the Mao erahave either declined or been taken over by foreign companies (for moreon this, see Chapter 9). Along these lines, La (2007) presents a ‘four newinventions’ argument to show that the Mao era performed better techno-logically. According to one poll survey of more than 50,000 respondents,the four winning entries of modern Chinese inventions, as opposed tothe four old inventions of paper, compass, mobile printing and gunpowder, are the hybrid rice crop (zajiao shuidao 杂交水稻), the laser type-setting and electronic publishing system of Chinese characters (hanzijiguang zhaopai 汉字激光照排), artificial synthetic crystalline insulin(rengong hecheng yidaosu 人工合成胰岛素) and the compound Artemether(fufang gaojiami 复方篙甲醚), the last being the malaria cure discovered atMawangdui as discussed in Chapter 1. These technological inven-tions that have won the title of Modern China’s Four Most ImportantInventions were all developed during the Mao era (Tian Fu 2007).

In connection with this, the abandonment of the Chinese develop-ment of civil aircraft Yun Shi (Transport 10) by the post-Mao authoritieshas been widely publicized in the e-media. One e-media participanteven suggested that Shen Tu, the head of the Chinese Civil Aviation atthe time, who later defected to the West, was either a CIA spy or was


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bribed by the American aviation industry. It was Shen Tu who arguedagainst developing the Chinese civil aviation industry and whofavoured buying American aircraft instead.

A chronicle of achievements

To support this line of argument for the success of the Mao era, a chron-icle of the important economic events has been widely circulated. Thisincludes many examples that counter the perception that Mao did notcare about China’s economical development. According to the chronicle,on 19 February 1966 Mao directed that China should work to mechanizeagriculture within 25 years. The 1972 entries of the chronicle list theimport of equipment for eight large chemical fertilizer and fabric facto-ries. Other entries include the successful annual Guangdong trade fairand China’s trading relationship with more than 150 countries. This alsoshows that Mao did not intend to close China to the outside worldeconomically and that China wanted to modernize its economy. Thechronicle lists many scientific and technological achievements from 1966to 1976, including the first Red Flag car, the invention of total syntheticcrystalline bovine insulin, the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb, the firstChinese transistor computer and later the integrated circuit computer,the first Chinese automatic three-dimensional camera, the first 100,000-ton tanker, the invention of Qingda antibiotics, the successful launchand recovery of a satellite, the first electron railway, the development ofDagang and Shengli oilfields and the Beijing Yanshan Oil refinery andso on. It even lists China’s first environmental conference and govern-ment policy to combat water pollution. Xiang Nanzi (2006) lists thefigures for railway construction in China in the Mao era and during thepost-Mao reform, and asks the reader to consider the fact that the aver-age annual growth of railways from 1950–78 was 942 kilometreswhereas during the period 1978–95 it was only 353 kilometres. There-fore, it is false to claim that it was only when Deng Xiaoping carried outthe reform that China’s economy began to develop.

Living standards and economic policies

In another contribution to the electronic journal San nong Zhongguo,Chu Su (2006) points out that Mao was always careful not to let theCultural Revolution obstruct economic activity. It was Mao who firstraised the formula of zhua geming chu shengchan (grasp revolution topromote production) when the Cultural Revolution document of theSixteen Points was drafted. Mao also inserted this formula in one ofChen Boda’s articles ‘The two-line struggle in the Great Cultural Revo-lution’ which has been recognized as one of the important documents


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that launched the Cultural Revolution. Mao also refused to approveChen Yonggui’s (the Party Secretary of Dazhai Brigade who waspromoted to be a vice-premier of the State Council) suggestion ofmaking the production brigade, instead of the production team, as thebasic accounting unit.4

One important evidence for the argument that economy stagnatedduring the Cultural Revolution was that workers’ salaries actually wentdown over ten years, from an average of 583 yuan a year in 1966 to 573yuan a year in 1976. However, Chu points out that during the sameperiod the total expenditure on salaries in China went up by 65 per cent.What happened was that while the salaries were kept down, morepeople became employed. Obviously in a country where there was noinflation and where prices of all the daily life goods were capped by thestate, salary increases are not as important as full employment for equal-ity and for ensuring the livelihood of all. In another contribution, Chu(2007) lists detailed figures of how China developed high-tech nationaldefence science, how Chinese petroleum and electronic industries devel-oped and how local industries and irrigation infrastructure expandedduring the Cultural Revolution period.

The strategic significance of the third-line industry and the coldwar

Apart from listing evidence and statistics that show the economicdevelopment and technical achievements during the Cultural Revolu-tion, Chu presents two points directed at the critics of Mao and theCultural Revolution. One was the development of the third-lineindustry, which used a lot of capital and resources to build up indus-trial bases such as the satellite-launching base in China’s remote southand northwest. Chu quotes Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin to showthat with hindsight, especially since the Iraq war, the third-line policywas far-sighted and strategically significant for China.

Chu’s other point concerns the accepted wisdom that the Mao erachose to close itself off from the outside world and that China opened uponly after Mao’s death. Chu points out that as early as 1964 and 1965Mao raised the prospect of allowing the Japanese to open up factories inChina. It was not Mao or China that refused to open to the West. Instead,it was the West that imposed economic sanctions against China. It wasMao who initiated the re-establishment of relationship with the UnitedStates The US government led by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissingerresponded to Mao’s initiative only because they hoped to play the Chinacard to balance the perceived threat of the Soviet Union and wantedChina to help end the Vietnam War. It was the US strategic shift thatmade it possible for China to be more open to the outside world. Coun-


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tries that had been following the US cold war strategy, such as Japan andAustralia, established diplomatic relations with China soon afterNixon’s 1972 historic visit of China. It was during the early 1970s thatmore than a dozen huge industrial and manufacturing projects werestarted, along with large-scale imports of equipment.

Infrastructure build-up, accumulation and delayed benefit

E-media participants accuse the post-Mao economic rationalists ofmanufacturing the belief that in the collective period farmers in thecommune system were lazy because of the ‘iron ricebowl’ mentality(the unbreakable food bowl). More and more e-media participants areready to accept the argument that the increase in food productionduring early years of the post-Mao reform was not the result of changeof land ownership from the collective to the private, but the result ofincreased benefits from developments achieved during the Mao era –infrastructure such as irrigation and technology improvements such aschemical fertilizer and improved seedlings. During the 20 years of thecollective period, the amount of irrigated land rose to 48 per cent ofChina’s arable land, and this 48 per cent produced more than 70 percent of China’s grain (He Xuefeng 2007). Substantial increases in grainproduction occurred from 1978 to 1984, when the commune systemwas still largely in place in China. On the other hand, in 1985 when thedismantling of the collective system was finally accomplished, nation-wide grain production went down dramatically the first time in years(Hu 2004).

Qiong Xiangqin (2007) argues that the increased agriculturalproduction in the early 1980s had nothing to do with dismantling thecollective system, but much to do with the increase in prices and theopening of the market. He also points out that the post-Mao reformersambushed the rural residents by dismantling the collective system bystealth and by coercion. As late as 1982, the then Premier Zhao Ziyang(1982: 1260) declared that the socialist transformation of rural Chinainto a collective system was necessary and absolutely correct. But ayear later in 1983 the CCP issued a command to dismantle the collec-tive system, ordered the rural organizations to change the collectivistname of commune to xiang (township – a term used in pre-1949 China)and distribute land among households even though many wereopposed to this. Some resisted the pressure, and there are still around2,000 villages that have kept the collective system; these include LiuVillage and Nanjie in Henan, Huaxi in Jiangsu, Daqiu in Tianjin, Henheand Doudian in Beijing, Zhouzhuang, Banbidian in Hebei, Honglin inHubei, Houshi in Dalian, Yankou and Ronggui in Guangdong,Tengtou and Wanhai in Zhejiang.


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When the food rationing of the Mao era is compared with the seem-ing abundance of food available on the market in today’s China, theargument that it is the post-Mao reform of privatization (the dismantlingof the collective system by contracting land to individual households)that increased productivity and grain production appears irrefutable.However, e-media participants argue that it was a matter of timing andthat even without the dismantling of the collective system grain produc-tion would have increased as much. Recently a piece (Ai 2007) circulatedon the e-media raises the question of who has solved the problem offeeding the Chinese people. Ai’s argument is that grain production inChina has less to do with the household responsibility system than withtechnology. The two technological breakthroughs that boosted grainproduction in China were hybrid rice seeding developed by Yuan Long-ping and hybrid wheat seeding developed by Li Zhensheng. Yuanstarted working on his project in 1964 and succeeded in developing theNanyou 2 hao (Nanyou No 2) in 1973 and Li succeeded in developing hisXiaoyan 6 hao (Xiaoyan No 6) in 1979. Both scientists worked during theMao era and during the Cultural Revolution.

Dou (2007) argues that before the rural reform started, agriculturalproduction had already shown a rapid growth. For instance, grainproduction in 1979 increased by 16.73 per cent compared with that in1975. And if one looks at the overall period of the Cultural Revolutionthe figures were even more impressive: between 1965, one year beforethe Cultural Revolution started, and 1975, one year before it officiallyended, grain production increased by a staggering 46.23 per cent (Dou2007). With the increase in chemical fertilizer available to Chinesefarmers, Dou argues that if the collective system had remained intact,the total grain production in 2000 would have reached 6 million tons,whereas in fact China only produced 4.62.17 million. Dou reaches thisconclusion by examining the available official statistics and byworking on the assumption of how chemical fertilizer input affectsgrain output.

E-media participants also skilfully employ postcolonial theory toargue that Western countries built up their industrial bases andeconomic well-being by colonizing and plundering the vast areas ofthe world that were endowed with rich land and natural resources andby exploiting the cheap labour of the slave trade. China has had noneof these options and therefore had to tighten its belt.

Manufacturing truth

These participants further argue that much of the ‘truth’ of economicfailure in the Mao era has been manufactured by the anti-Maoist andanti-revolutionary Chinese media. Lao Tian (2006b), by analysing the


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content of newspaper reports of that time, gives a good example of howthe anti-Mao and anti-Cultural Revolution truth has been manufactured.It is now widely accepted that during the Cultural Revolution the Gangof Four used the political rhetoric of ge zibenzhuyi de weiba (cut off thecapitalist [commercialism] tails) and ningyao shehuizhuyi de cao buyaozibenzhuyi de miao (we would rather have socialist weeds than capitalistcrops) to sabotage economic activities. But according to research into thecontent of the People’s Daily from 1950 to 1976 by one e-media partici-pant, there were 26 news reports dealing with the topic of ‘cutting off thecapitalist tails’; of these only five showed a positive attitude towardssuch rhetoric and the rest (21) were actually critical of it. Another e-media participant quoted by Lao Tian uses ningyao … buyao (rather …than) as a key word to search the People’s Daily and finds that during theMao era from 1949 to 1976 there were only 22 news reports or opinionpieces that used the grammatical structure ningyao … buyao. From 1976onwards, however, there were many more news items that used thisgrammatical structure as a way of criticizing the Cultural Revolution byinventing slogans that were supposedly used during it. Phrases such as‘we would rather have socialist late trains than capitalist trains on time’,‘we would rather have a low socialist growth rate than a high capitalistgrowth rate’ never appeared in the Mao era, but were later invented bythe media to criticize it. It is clear that the post-Mao media framed manytopics in this grammatical structure and then claimed that they wereadvocated as Maoist policies.

Signs of a re-evaluation of Jiang Qing

Emerging quietly are a number of voices that attempt to re-evaluateMao’s wife Jiang Qing (Xin Ma 2006). Qi Benyu’s rebuttal of the claimthat Mao and Jiang did not get one well was widely circulated (YuErxin 2006a).5 It is also claimed in the e-media that during an interview,the famous Rebel leader at Qinghua University Kuai Dafu avers thatJiang was an outstanding Chinese woman in almost every aspect. Shewas caring and very cultured, as shown by her very good handwriting,her knowledge of Marxism and her talent for organization andpublicity. It is also widely reported in the e-media that Jiang hadspecial talents in arts (Tian 2006).

Jiang Qing and He Zhizhen

In a recent interview, Zhu Zhongli admits that her best selling biogra-phies of Jiang Qing, Nühuang meng (Dream of being Empress) and JiangQing mi zhuan (A Secret Biography of Jiang Qing), contained fictionbecause no account of Jiang Qing could be published unless she was


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demonized in it (Shi 2007).6 Zhu also admitted that she had knownMao and Jiang well since the Yan’an days and that it was not JiangQing who seduced Mao, as has been popularly portrayed, to advanceher career. It was Mao who pursued Jiang. Mao liked Jiang not onlybecause she was pretty and young but also because she was talentedand very knowledgeable about Marxist revolutionary ideas. Unlikeother senior revolutionary leaders at that time Jiang Qing had actuallyread some Marxist-Leninist classics. She published writings thatshowed her understanding of Marxism in the 1930s in Shanghai beforeshe arrived in Yan’an.

It has been an accepted wisdom in the biographical and memoirliterature that Jiang lured Mao by hook and by crook, and thereforepushed He Zhizhen (Mao’s third wife before Jiang Qing) away fromhim. Jiang Qing was therefore considered immoral and an evil person,a decadent, third-rate Shanghai actress who conspired to victimize aveteran woman revolutionary. But according to Zhu, He Zhizhen didnot have much in common with Mao apart from their revolutionaryexperience in Jiangxi, whereas Jiang’s ideas on literature and artsinspired Mao even in his late years. Zhu gives one incident to show thelimitations of He Zhizhen. Once when He saw Mao having a hug witha foreign journalist she went over and smacked the journalist on theface, not knowing that hugging in foreign countries might mean nomore than a handshake. Zhu says that it was He’s own fault that Maodivorced her. Zhu, a qualified doctor who was responsible for lookingafter the high-ranking party officials in Yan’an, actually suggests thatHe was then already clinically crazy. She wanted to leave Yan’an to goto the Soviet Union for treatment, although Mao strongly objected tothat. He Zhizhen had several miscarriages and, despite Zhu’s efforts tocover up, Mao eventually realized that some of his wife’s pregnancieshad nothing to do with him (Shi 2007).

In defence of Jiang Qing: a feminist perspective

In an interview circulated in the e-media, Chen Yonggui also speaksvery highly of Jiang Qing and considers her a good example of beingincorruptible (Tian 2006). Many people gradually come to realize thatmuch of the slander piled on the character of Jiang Qing may havesomething to do with deep-seated gender discrimination among Mao’srevolutionary comrades. It was Mao who had a liberal attitude towardthe gender issue. When some CCP cadres around Mao raised objectionto his marriage with Jiang on the ground that she was a divorcedwoman who had a dubious life in Shanghai, Mao is reported to havesaid that he himself was a divorced man. Lan Yezi (2006) argues that somany accusations against Jiang actually stemmed from Chinese male


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prejudices against women. One accusation levelled at Jiang was thatshe lived with men without getting married. However this could alsobe seen as modern, progressive and revolutionary at that time. Afurther counter to the accusation is to ask whether men are accused ofthe same crime. Lan argues that it is not fair to accuse Jiang of marryingMao to advance herself. A woman cannot marry anyone withouthaving to answer charges of an ulterior motive. Liu Shaoqi marriedfive times and yet that was a non-issue in the official discourse.

Jiang Qing and the arts

Jiang Qing is often accused of not only being a third-rate actress but alsoof being responsible for wiping out artistic expression and creativity. Thisagain is widely repudiated in the e-media. Yang Chunxia (2006), the mainfemale actor in the opera The Azalea Mountain, argues that the modelPeking operas, largely initiated by Jiang Qing, are still unsurpassed asmonumental productions. Ting Guang (2006) even asserts that the modelPeking operas were an unprecedented achievement in the history ofChinese literature and arts. What Jiang was trying to do, with the fullsupport of Mao because the latter found her ideas inspirational, was tocreate new arts both in contents and forms. The experiment of the Pekingopera clearly shows that Jiang and her followers were trying to achievesomething new by combing three elements into one organic performanceart: revolutionary content (women’s liberation and participation in soci-ety as in The White Haired Girl and The Red Regiment of the Woman’s Army),traditional Chinese art (Peking opera) and Western techniques of artisticexpression (ballet and wind and string music instruments). Of courseJiang Qing could not take all the credit for this unprecedented artisticrevolutionary enterprise. Other Chinese artists had been doing this fordecades, even before the well-known talk given at an art forum in Yan’anby Mao in 1942. But it was Mao who articulated this effort by populariz-ing the idea of Yang wei zhong yong, gu wei jin yong (to use the foreign toserve the Chinese and the past to serve the present). Jiang Qing was oneof the most articulate and most persistent in pursuing this goal. Becauseof this she made many enemies among the artistic elite.

Resistance to revolutionary arts

There was a powerful conservative establishment in the literary and artscircles that not only wanted to maintain the content and form of the artsthat they know and cherish but also hated those who wanted to makechanges. It was precisely for this reason that Mao criticized the pre-Cultural Revolution arts establishment in China for their failure toproduce literature and arts along the lines that were sketched out in his


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talk at the Yan’an Forum in 1942, and it was for this reason that the revo-lution for artistic change was part of the ‘Cultural Revolution’. The factthat the diagnosis was right has been proved by what has happenedsince the post-Mao reform: the performing and visual arts have beendominated by diwang jiangxiang, caizi jiaren (emperors, prime ministers,generals, scholars and pretty women – Mao’s diagnosis of the pre-Cultural Revolution arts). The majority of the Chinese – the rural people– are bombarded with programmes that have nothing to do with theirown lives. For the elite of the artistic establishment, the very idea of artexpressing the life of the ordinary people is an anathema. For them, artcan only be created by and for the high class.

Mao’s ideas of art meant the end of the art world as we know it. Theexample of Hao Ran, a well-known novelist in the Mao era is a goodillustration. Hao recollects that he was criticized soon after the death ofMao and was not allowed to see foreign visitors, who were told by thepost-Mao authorities that Hao was a fraud, an illiterate whose bookswere ghost-written by someone else (Cai 2006).7 Hao himself, however,has never regretted his work of revolutionary art and is proud of hisnovels. He claims that his work made a positive contribution to theChinese people and the fact that a person like him can be writer of signif-icance is a miracle that can occur only in a country under leaders likeMao. All these revisionist views are widely circulated in the e-media.

The issues of health care and education

The provision of healthcare and education to the vast majority of thepoor in the Mao era was a historic achievement unprecedented inhuman history, an achievement that had to be admitted even by thosewho hated the Chinese revolution. What is remarkable about theseachievements is that even the rural Chinese benefited from them.

Inspired by economic rationalism and with a declared aim ofmaking education and healthcare more efficient, the post-Mao Chinesegovernment have carried out reforms that reversed Maoist policies.Guided by the principle of ‘entrepreneurizing education’ and ‘marke-tizing healthcare’ (jiaoyu chanyehua, yiliao shichanghua), the post-Maoauthorities concentrate their meagrely allocated resources on the eliteschools and hospitals in urban centres while the rest were pushed tothe market for their own survival. Many of the e-media participants arescathing in their criticism of these reforms.

The deterioration of healthcare and education services, especially forthe rural people, is an indictment of the post-Mao reform regimes inBeijing. However, very few of the Chinese political and intellectual elitewant the comparison between the two systems to be made. Whathappened to Professor Chen Meixia is a good example. in 2001 she wrote


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an essay in English in praise of the healthcare system during the era ofMao. In this paper Chen is very positive about the achievements ofhealthcare during the Mao era and especially during the Cultural Revo-lution as the result of four important health strategies. These were: 1)healthcare was primarily directed to serving workers and farmers, 2) themain focus was on preventative medicine, 3) the healthcare system wasa combination of Western and Chinese medicine, and 4) the masses weremobilized to tackle health issues. However, the post-Mao regime aban-doned all of these strategies for ideological reasons. Chen sent this arti-cle to some Chinese scholars and asked them to translate and circulateit, but heard nothing from them. It was not until 2006 that the essay wastranslated and widely circulated in the e-media.

The three big new mountains

According to Yang Guang (2007), the Chinese per capita expenditure oneducation in 2005 was only a quarter of the average expenditure indeveloping countries, and China numbered the eighth from the bottomin UNESCO’s ranking in education investment. The central govern-ment’s share of cost on healthcare decreased by 32 per cent in 1978 to ameagre 15 per cent in 2005 (Yang Guang 2007). Most of this expenditurewas on urban centres and heavily orientated towards the care of thegovernment officials. It was not until more than a decade after thesechanges began that their consequences began to be keenly seen and felt.The net result of these reforms is that the vast majority of the Chinese areeither struggling or entirely unable to provide their children with educa-tion or medical treatment. With housing increasingly unaffordable for allbut a few of the urban residents, the Chinese are now talking about the‘three big new mountains’ on their backs, healthcare, education andhousing (Yang Guang 2007). The phrase ‘three big new mountains’reflects what Mao described as the three big old mountains thatoppressed the Chinese people in pre-1949 China: imperialism, feudalismand comprador bureaucratic-capitalism.8 As Yang’s analysis shows,healthcare has not really been marketized and education has not reallybeen entrepreneurial. Both are an excuse for the government to shed itsresponsibility. Instead, both education and healthcare have becomemoney-making organs for those in management control.

The voice of the workers

Workers do not mince words about what they think about these reforms.The headlines of contributions that published on Zhongguo gongren wang(Chinese Workers Net) shows this clearly and here are some headlinesrelated to welfare concerns such as education and healthcare:


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‘Compared with the present, welfare was great in the pre-reform years’,‘My experience of healthcare when I was a child’, ‘The great reversal:healthcare in the People’s Republic of China’, ‘Who is paying the cost ofreforms?’ and ‘The unfairness of healthcare in China: 80 per cent goes tothe privileged in the party, the government and army’.

Recently, Zhongguo gongren wang (Chinese workers net 2007)published recorded interviews with workers in Zhengzhou by a groupof university students from Beijing. It was eye opening for the studentsto learn that the privatization of state-owned enterprises led to noevidence of greater efficiency, but to misery for the workers and enrich-ment of the managers. The students admitted that they were shocked tofind that the workers not only have fond memories of Mao but alsopraised the Cultural Revolution. One worker said that education, healthand housing are three big problems whereas in the Mao era the workersdid not have worry about them at all. The worker also said that in theMao era the Four Big Freedoms – speaking out freely, airing views fully,holding big debates and putting up big-character posters, plus the free-dom to strike – were written into the Constitution, but now workers darenot go out and demonstrate in the street. ‘We want to commemorateMao every year but the government would not even allow us to do that.’Another worker said that the unfairness in today’s society had tilted lifein favour of the rich so much that China is like a boat that is about tosink. Another worker complains that when people like him get sick theydare not go to the hospital. Instead, ‘we wait to die. In fact many commitsuicide to release the family from the financial burden.’

The voice of the farmers

The website Sannong Zhongguo (agriculture in China, rural China andfarmers in China) regularly publishes contributions on the current ruralsituation and on how the people in rural China think and feel about theMao era and the post-Mao reform policies. Many of these contributionsare made by those who were born and grew up in the countryside butmoved to urban areas later in their life. Consistent with my fieldworkfindings in Jiangxi and Shanxi, the overwhelming voice of the ruralpeople is that they recall the Mao era with fondness and complain a lotabout the post-Mao reform policies. According to this voice, Mao is theirnumber one admired and respected leader whereas Deng Xiaoping andJiang Zemin either do not register or are mentioned only in their criti-cism (Xiao Er 2007). Visiting his home town in Henan, Xiao Er, a univer-sity student from Henan University also asked his fellow villagers aboutthe Great Leap Forward famine. The villagers pointed out that therewere natural disasters (tian zai) and they would add that Mao, ZhouEnlai and other leaders took the lead in bearing the hardship. They


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would also argue that the increase of grain production had more to dowith the improvement of infrastructure such as irrigation, technologicalbreakthrough such as better seeding and availability of chemical inputssuch as fertilizer and insecticide.

Education and revolution in the big picture

Analytical discussion of the ideas and practices of education in theMao era is also circulated in the e-media. For instance, Cheng andManning (2003) argue that education reform under Mao was in fact notsomething crazy worked up by a fanatical Mao. It is in fact within thetradition of Marxism and the Western radical criticism of education forits elite and urban orientation, its neglect of practical skills and its sepa-ration of school from society and education from work. In China thecriticism started with the May Fourth Movement, and Cai Yuanpei, thepresident of Beijing University, for instance, advocated work–studyprogrammes. Marx of course envisaged ‘well-developed men’ incommunist society, ideas inspired by the French Revolution to create‘new men’. In the early Soviet period the first commissioner of SovietEducation, Anatol Lunacharski, issued a report on education thatenunciated seven basic principles with an emphasis on an ‘early fusionof productive labour and academic institutions: and school as aproductive commune’. V.N. Shul’gin, director of the Institute of SchoolMethods in Moscow, even argued that children should not grow up inschools nor in kindergartens, but in the factory, the mill, the agricul-tural economy, the class struggle. Mao’s idea that labouring peopleought to ‘be simultaneously intellectuals while the intellectuals shouldalso be labourers’ was just a natural progression along these lines.Mao’s epistemological assumption can clearly be seen in one of hismajor works, On Practice, which claimed that true knowledge comesonly from practice and that productive activity is the fundamentalsource for learning.

A re-evaluation of Kang Sheng?

There was even a call to rehabilitate Kang Sheng, who has beenportrayed as an evil character in the literature in both Chinese andEnglish (Lin Qingshan 1988, Byron 1992), given his role in Yan’an inpursuing suspected spies that victimized many. According to Wang Li(2006), Kang Sheng was not only a very cultured man but also a moder-ate during the Cultural Revolution. Kang was not a cold-blooded KGBmonster as he is popularly portrayed. To illustrate, Wang reveals thatKang Sheng once protected Deng Tuo during the anti-rightist move-ment. At some stage at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution Kang


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even acted to cover for Liu Shaoqi. He also briefed Zhou Enlai aboutMao’s idea of the Cultural Revolution prior to the events unfolding sothat Zhou could avoid making the mistake of not following the Mao line.Kang Sheng was also against po si jiu (destroy the four olds) and againstany destruction of wenwu (cultural and religious relics and artefacts).Instead of destroying wenwu or collecting them for his own benefit (ashe is often accused of doing), according to Wang, Kang made a greatcontribution to protecting them. He was a knowledgeable connoisseurand a passionate collector of Chinese cultural relics and artefacts, anddonated all his collections to the state upon his death.

The Chinese themselves say so

These contrary voices have steadily become louder and louder (that is,more strident and frequent) in the e-media. However, this reversal ofattitude toward the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution, if it is going tohappen at all, will take a long time to catch the attention of the West.When the Chinese authorities and elite intelligentsia started to condemnand denounce the Cultural Revolution, the West understood the atroc-ity discourse quickly by applying the logic that ‘the Chinese themselvessay so’. Those of the political left and of progressive persuasions werequickly persuaded to surrender their belief. Or they have been margin-alized. Will ‘the Chinese themselves say so’ reversal be as effective, sothat it will be chatted about over coffee by the elite, and even be placedon the flashy magazines under the coffee tables of the non-elite? It is veryhard to imagine so. The denunciation of the Cultural Revolution andMao fits the anti-communist political agenda and anti-Chinese racistagenda well, but the reversal of that verdict does not.

Manufacturing truth and e-media counter-action

E-media contributors also increasingly dissect how the mainstreammedia is controlled by the government and made to propagate thesuccess of post-Mao reform. Ma Ming (2006), for instance is scathingabout how the media sets the agenda along this direction. Ma pointsout that a film based on Hao Ran’s book Jin guang dadao is forbiddenbecause it commits the political crime of re-telling the story about thegood old days of the Mao era. ‘What are we allowed to watch instead?’Ma asks. We are allowed to watch the dynasties and emperors and tobe told how wonderful they were. Yes, these were even better old days.

One instance of this propaganda is worth telling here. There aremany media stories and reports about Xiaogang Village, the villagethat supposedly took the initiative of dismantling the collectivesystem, doing so in secret because this was at odds with the political


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climate in the 1970s, an initiative that was hailed as another ‘libera-tion’. Even when a television programme provides accounts ofChina’s success in feeding its huge population, it may use pictures ofXiaogang Village as the background. However the media and thosewho join the chorus fail to mention how much the state has donatedto this village to promote it as a model of the household responsibil-ity system. In spite of government’s pouring money into the villageit is still poor today, so poor that its leaders are reported to havevisited the still collectivized Nanjie Village to consider the possibilityof re-collectivization (Yuan Wenbiao 2006).

The official history propagated by the media claims that the disman-tling of the collective system by Xiaogang Village was so effective thatgrain output in the village increased from an annual 30,000 jin to 120,000jin in 1979. What the media do not want to reveal is that 30,000 jin was theyield in 1978 when there was a terrible drought, whereas on average theannual output was 190,000 to 200,000 jin during the collective period. In1979, the year when the land was divided up, the output actually wentdown 40 per cent compared the annual average under the collectivesystem. Some years later the media claimed that in 1997 the villageyielded an output of 1,200,000 jin, indicating that this was a tremendoussuccess of post-Mao reform. Again what the media did not say is that thefigures were the total amount of grain yielded in several villages that had been amalgamated and were jointly renamed Xiaogang Village (LaoTian 2007b).

Another aspect in manufacturing the truth about this village is alsorevealed in the e-media. In 1978, due to the drought that year, othervillages all started to contract responsibility to small teams while stillmaintaining the collective system. However, the situation in XiaogangVillage was so divisive and there was so much internal tension, evenamong members of the same lineage, that they were not able to formteams. It was under these circumstances that the village head YanJunchang decided that the land was to be carved up among the house-holds. The so-called historical act had nothing to do with the villagers’courageous rebellion against the collective system. It had more to dowith the village leaders’ inability to get the village organized.

The legacy of Mao and the e-media

Information of this kind can be increasingly seen in the e-media forthree main reasons. The first is that the consequences and problems ofthe reform policies are now being seen and felt by the majority of thepeople, as discussed in other chapters. There is backlash against atleast some of the reform policies.9 The second reason is that e-mediahas become more user-friendly and more accessible. As a result the


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previous monopoly of the media by the political and elite intelligentsiahas been broken. The third reason has much to do with the legacy ofMaoism. The ideas of Mao and the staging of the Cultural Revolutionactually trained and prepared many people, who were young andidealistic at that time, to think and reflect critically about political andsocial issues. Some of this ‘Cultural Revolution-generated thinkinggeneration’ have become dissidents and anti-communists. But thereare some who do not oppose communism for the sake of opposing anddo not embrace capitalism as an ideological crusade. These are thepeople who have begun to raise their voices by questioning everyaccepted aspect of the manufactured truth.

Conclusion: voices from the bottom for a battle that has justbegun

The e-media have provided a space for voices that cannot be heardthrough the conventional media. As I have acknowledged, many of theclaims by the e-media debate participants may be erroneous and manyof their arguments are unsubstantiated. For instance, recently a personusing the pen-name Zuo Ke (2006) went as far as to argue that the Maoera was the golden period for China’s development of the computerindustry. To fully engage in this issue alone would require a book-length study. By presenting their voices I do not intend to argue thatonly their voices represent the truth. Instead, I wish to show that thehegemony of the official discourse on the Cultural Revolution and theMao era has been challenged by these voices. If we don’t want to listento these voices, many Chinese will.

Apart from uncoordinated contributions along these lines invarious blogs, bulletin board systems, websites and chatrooms, thereare a number websites that are specifically designed to counteract theChinese political and elite intelligentsia’s monopoly of the mainstreamconventional media and interpretation of history. In the resurrectedChinese Workers Net, for instance, most of the published pieces werepositive about the Mao era and critical of the post-Mao reform. Hereare few headlines as illustrations:

• Whose is thorough democracy? Of course it was Mao’s bigdemocracy.

• Compared with now, the pre-reform welfare was great.• Forever remembering.• Regarding workers from rural China and care for work injuries:

the collective had the strength to protect us.• Memory of an old coal miner: we had the best of times in production

and coal mining safety.


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• Healthcare during my childhood.• How did we develop collective enterprises: the economic basis for

us being masters.• Re-appearance of the plague: the snail fever disease spreads again.• Worship of Mao was not a phenomenon of brainwashing.• What have transnational companies brought to us?• Are the American media objective and neutral?• Who is bearing the cost of China’s reform?• Is private ownership necessarily democratic? How does the elite

hegemonize the discourse of reform?• Liberated peasants will never forget Mao: stories by grandma.• We would elect Mao again.

This challenge to the elitists has not gone unnoticed or unchallenged.Some websites were not allowed to operate for long. The ChineseWorkers Net was shut down only a few months after its appearance.The website Shiji Zhongguo (Century China) was also shut down in2006 after a few years of operation. But there are some websites that arestill in operation at time of writing such as Mao Zedong qizhi wang (theMao Zedong Flag net), http://www. maoflag.net/, Wuyou zhixiang(Utopia), http://www.wyzxwyzx.com, Sannong Zhongguo http://www.snzg.net/default.asp, Gong nong tian di (Space for the workersand farmers) https://www.fsurf.com/index. php?q=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5nb25nbm9uZy5vcmc per cent3D, Huayue luntan (Huayue forum)https://w7.spetra.net.ru/dmirror/http/69.41.162.74/HuaShan/GB2.html. The Gansu site of Xinlang launched a migrant worker blogpage in 2007. In its first issue, the two pieces of short writing in asimple style by migrant workers gave a very positive evaluation ofMao (http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/hongbie#feeds FEEDS 1261878412(accessed on 18 January 2007).

In 2005, when there was some indication that the Hu Jintao and WenJiabao leadership was re-orientating China’s development priority forthe first time since the 1980s, and when Wen Jiabao was reported toread the e-media regularly, the neoliberal elite was alarmed. ProfessorZhang Weiying, the Oxford-trained economist, appealed to theChinese leadership not to be pressurized by the populist voices of thee-media. Another neoliberal, Gao Changquan (2006), found it incred-ible that Wuyou zhixiang had the audacity to publish pieces that attackDeng Xiaoping and praise Zhang Chunqiao for his theoretical articula-tion of the proletarian revolution. These are calls to battle, and the warin China between the capitalist model and an alternative may yet bewon by either side.


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9 The problem of therural–urban divide inpursuit of modernity: values and attitudes

Introduction: the year 2003

This chapter deliberately restricts its analysis to the period before 2003.It is clear that since that year the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao leadership,which came to power in 2002, has adopted a different stance towardsrural China. It has apparently paid heed to the many-faceted social andeconomic problems in rural China that the previous Jiang Zemin andZhu Rongji leadership did not address. The most notable change wasthe 2003 abolition of all agricultural taxes. Boyang County of Jiangxiprovince, where Gao Village is situated, was one of the counties thatbenefited from this reform. When I visited Gao Village in early 2005 Iimmediately noticed the difference. Of many visits of the village, thiswas the first when I did not hear any complaint against the govern-ment policies from any of the villagers. Not only was there no tax ofany kind, there was even some subsidies for farming the land. For thevillagers it was unbelievably liberating because taxes have had to bepaid since history began in the village. However, it is still too early tosee whether the reform will succeed and too early to evaluate its long-term effects, though the limitations of the tax-free reform are alreadyapparent (Yep 2004). Nonetheless, 2003 may be a watershed year forthe rural Chinese, as it was the year when the 2,500-year practice oftaxing rural China to finance the government and support urbanconsumption came to a close. Therefore, this chapter will only discussthe rural situation up to 2003 in its relation to the era of Mao.

The rise of China, but the risk of collapse

Amid the persistent fears of the rise of China in the Western mediathere are frequent predictions that the Chinese system is so unsustain-able that it will collapse sooner rather than later (Chang 2001). On 8January 2004, the highly influential New York Times published awarning that ‘China may be in [a] bubble now’ (Chan 2004). Would webe surprised if the Chinese system collapsed (either politically or

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economically or both)? Obviously this question is too ambitious toaddress here, and is outside the scope of this chapter where I evaluatethe rural situation. But it is clear to me that even if the Chinese systemcollapses, the direct cause is unlikely to come from rural China. LiChangping specifically addresses this issue by stating that a large-scalepeasant rebellion in contemporary China is not likely (Li 2004).

Meanwhile we have become accustomed to media reports thatChina has been experiencing a major economic boom and is the engineof economic growth in Asia with its huge increase in volumes of trade,and that China is the playground for modern architecture (Thornton2004, Stucke 2004, Samuelson 2004, Einhorn 2004a). For the urban resi-dents of the booming southeast costal cities, the China they know andcare about is the one in which the goal of life is to achieve ‘middle class’status – a status that includes family cars, holidays abroad and childrenstudying overseas. But in the other China the picture is completelydifferent (Gao 2003). In some rural areas we can still see ‘unimaginablepoverty’, ‘unimaginable helplessness’, ‘unimaginable silence andunimaginable tragedy’ (Chen and Chun 2004).

The urban–rural divide

According to research conducted by the Chinese Academy of SocialSciences, after 20 years of reform urban residents now earn 2.8 timesmore than rural people (Cheng 2004). If factors such as rising costs ofeducation and health are taken into consideration, the gap is as highas six times, the highest in the world. According to another study, ofthe average rural dweller’s per capita income of 2,618 RMB in 2003,agricultural contributions fell below 60 per cent, while the contribu-tion from migrant workers’ earnings rose from 8 percentage points tomore than 40 per cent. The average net annual income of migrantworkers, after living and travel expenses, came to 3,768 RMB (aboutUS$500) in 2003, according to the survey, which was based on inter-views in 20,089 rural households in China’s 31 provinces (Kynge2004). According to the Chinese official media, there was a 5.8 percent reduction in grain production in 2003 compared with 2002, and99 million rural residents left their homes as migrant workers in 2003,a 5 million increase compared with 2002 (Xinhua News 2004). Accord-ing to another study, urban residents who make up only 15 per centof China’s total population consume two-thirds of the country’shealthcare resources while the other 85 per cent of the populationhave access to less than a third of the country’s healthcare resources(Song Bingwen et al. 2003). Clearly, the rural–urban divide has beenwidening and the deteriorating rural situation has been ignored bythe Chinese leadership for a long time.


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Three stories of rural pain

The rural situation discussed here does not include the southeast coastalprovinces of Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Fujian. Nordoes it include the poverty-stricken areas of the northwest provinces ofGansu, Qinghai, Shaanxi and Tibet or Xinjiang. The southeast costalprovinces can be categorized into two subgroups. The first consists of thePearl River Delta and some parts of Fujian, where investment from outsidemainland China have created a special kind of development. Zhejiang andJiangsu belong to the second subgroup where TVEs (township and villageenterprises) advanced rapidly during the late 1970s and throughout the1980s and have developed into private enterprises since the 1990s. In theareas of northwest there is a lack of agricultural resources and very little,if any, local industry. Even the environment is hostile to human existence.The central provinces of Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, Hunan, Hubei, Anhui,Jiangxi, Sichuan Guizhou, Guangxi and Yunnan, plus areas of Fujian andGuangdong, the so-called ‘grain belt’ areas (Unger 2002), are not onlyChina’s agricultural base but also major sources of migrant workers.

Chen and Chun’s investigation into rural poverty became a mediaevent when their book on the rural situation in Anhui was publishedin 2004. The book was soon banned by the Chinese authorities, but anEnglish version appeared in 2006. The following three stories are toldby Chen and Chun and may be seen as a metaphor for the agony, hard-ship and the complex situation faced by most of the rural people incentral areas.

The story of Ding

In 1993 a group of farmers wrote a letter of complaint about the prob-lems of corruption and abusive levies. Ding was beaten to death by localtownship security guards for leading the complaint group. Angry at thisbrutality several thousand villagers got together to protest, an event thatmade the death known to the central government through a XinhuaNews Agency journalist, Kong Xiangying. However, in order to cover upthe abusive levies and taxes under his government, Dai Wenhu, theparty secretary of Lixin County, reported to Beijing that Ding’s deathhad been caused by a civil dispute. After an investigation by a teamfrom Beijing into the event, the State Council issued the documentGuanyu jianqing nongmin fudan de jinji tongzhi (an urgent circularconcerning the reduction of the burden on farmers). Followed by a StateCouncil meeting on the issue and another document, a decision wasmade in Beijing that more than 120 different levies and taxes were to beabolished, reduced or postponed. Some of those who were responsiblefor Ding’s death were executed, imprisoned, or disciplined.

T H E P R O B L E M O F T H E R U R A L–U R B A N D I V I D E

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Brutal taxes and levies

The Ding story looks like a story that ends well: justice was done andthe central government took measures to reduce the peasants’ taxburden. But decisions made in Beijing are one thing; whether they areimplemented throughout the country is another. This is illustrated byanother story from the same province Anhui where Chen and Chunmade their study. Zhang Guiquan, who had been convicted of rapeand corruption, was appointed village head before he had evenfinished his prison term. When the villagers organized a team to inves-tigate amount of levies Zhang collected and his methods of collection,he and his sons killed four members of the investigative team. Againto cover up the grave tax and levy situation the country newspaperand television station reported the news as a village feud and the deathof four men as the result of manslaughter.

The three Wangs

The third story started in 1993. The party secretary of a villagecommittee, Gao Jianjun, took away Wang Hongchao’s television setbecause the latter did not pay the 6 RMB demanded for what wasclaimed to be a school building construction fee. Wang Junbing andWang Hongchao went to the xiang (township) government tocomplain, but their complaint was ignored. The two Wang’s plus WangXiangdong then went to the county government demanding a re-appraisal but were rebuked and physically pushed out of the receptionoffice before they could even say what they had come about. Afterorganizing a couple of protest marches involving several hundredvillagers to the county town, to no avail, the three Wang’s decided totake their complaint to Beijing. Though the authorities in Beijing, afterhearing their case, gave instructions to rectify the situation, and thoughthe country authority under pressure from Beijing ordered the villagecommittee to refund to the villagers all the illegal levies, nothing wasactually done at the village level. Moreover, Wang Junbing was sackedfrom his land management job at the township and the other twoWangs were beaten up by xiang government personnel.

What followed looked like fiction, but unfortunately was real. Onedark night a team of five men consisting of local police and securityguards went to arrest the three Wangs. The villagers were quickly alertedto the late night raid. Many of them got up quickly and surrounded theintruders, who would not admit that they were sent by the xiang govern-ment officially to arrest the three Wangs. The villagers disarmed the fivemen but later let them go after they admitted that they were actuallypolice. But that was enough for the county government to send a police


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force of more than a hundred to suppress the ‘rebellion’. Before thepolice reached the village more than a thousand people had fled toHenan province (as the village is on the border between Anhui andHenan). The police nevertheless arrested twelve villagers, mostly theelderly, women and children. Some men were beaten up and wereshackled, and they were asked to pay 7 RMB for the cost of the shackles.Wang Hongchao, Wang Xiaodong and Wang Hongxin, who alsoescaped, set off for Beijing again but were ambushed by the countypolice, who had been waiting for them.

Meanwhile a villager Li Xiwen, also from the county where theWangs were suppressed, killed himself by jumping down from theBeijing Letter and Complaint (Xin fang ban) reception building in hisdespair at finding no way of redressing what he considered an injus-tice. And there is more. On 29 October 1994, a clear Sunday, 74 villagerssneaked into Tian’anmen Square and knelt together before the nationalflag of the People’s Republic of China, asking for justice. Only then didthe central government urge Anhui to solve the problem. WangXiaodong was released after 19 months imprisonment and WangJunbing was appointed party secretary of the village committee toreplace his corrupt predecessor.

Rural Chinese: beasts of burden on whom modernity is built

Why is it that so many central government documents and decreescould not stop the ever increasing tide of levies and taxes? Accordingto Chen and Chun (2004), more than 90 different levies and taxes thathad been imposed on the Chinese peasantry in Anhui province fromvarious departments of the central government, and an additional 269were imposed by local governments. The central government issueddecrees and documents in general terms with instructions to reducetaxes and levies, like the stipulation that total taxes and levies on anyhousehold should not be more than 5 per cent of the family’s annualincome. But in practice financial and fiscal policies and revenue andexpenditure regulations designed for and by the central governmentactually led to an increase in the burden on rural residents.

Taxation reform

One of the reforms designed by Premier Zhu Rongji was to establish atwo-tiered tax system, one tier for the central government tax and onefor the local government tax, called guo di shui fenjia (separation of taxescollected by [the central] state and taxes and levies collected by the localgovernments). The intention was to make sure that central state govern-ment tax revenue would not be infringed upon by local authorities. The


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central government was to collect value-added tax and consumption taxwhereas the local governments were to collect business tax, personaland enterprise income tax.

As a result of this reform, local governments’ revenue fell, and tocover their loss of revenue they taxed the rural residents. In 1993, forinstance, the financial income of the central government was 95 billionRMB and in 1994 it increased to more than 290 billion. In contrast, thefinancial income of the local governments over the same period fell from339 billion RMB to 231 billion. Meanwhile, financial expenditure allo-cated from the central government to rural China increased by only 44billion RMB, from 131 billion to a mere 175 billion, whereas the financialresponsibilities of local rural governments increased from 332.2 billionRMB to 403 billion. In other words, Premier Zhu wanted local govern-ments to pay more to the centre but at the same time take on responsi-bilities for greater expenditure (Chen and Chun 2004). AmnestyInternational, whose criticisms of countries like China usually focus onpolitical and civil rights, published a study condemning the Chinesesocial and economic policies that push for development at the expenseof millions of rural migrants (see Watts 2007).

What was the extra income collected by the central governmentused for? It was used for more urban development. One indication ofthis is the high-speed magnetic railway from the city of Shanghai to itsairport. The rail track is so short that the train has to stop only a fewminutes after it reaches its full speed. It uses Germany technology soexpensive that even the Germans have not built a single railway of thistype. It was an expensive toy with a billion dollar price tag for the cityof Shanghai to boost its image of being modern and advanced.

Let us join the Western world

The creation of an elite class is now considered a sign of modernity anda way to catch up with the West. In almost every urban centre one canencounter advertisements encouraging consumers to become amember of the guizu (literally ‘expensive clan’, but often translated as‘noble’ or ‘aristocratic’ in English). Thus you can see furniture adver-tised as guizu furniture and a piece of sportswear as guizu xiuxian(aristocratic leisure wear) and a real estate compound as guizu cun(noble or aristocratic village). Another example of development for thebenefit of the elite is the fashion for building golf courses. China is wellknown for its lack of arable land and water resources, yet there is fiercecompetition to build golf courses. In 2006, the president of XiamenUniversity, Zhu Congshi, announced that his university hadconstructed a beautiful golf course to train students to becomemembers of the elite. Zhu declares that training an elite is an exampleof educating the best for the public interest (Wuyou zhixiang 2006).


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I don’t see it, so it doesn’t exist

As for the majority of the rural Chinese, they are assumed to belongproperly to another class. The case of Yang Shanlu is typical of those inrural China, and his life is taken for granted as a normal for a Chinesepeasant. Yang has 3.3 mu of land to farm and his costs in 2000 came to atotal of 997.5 RMB (made up of: seeding 67.5, insecticide 20, fertilizer 190,electricity for irritation 140, rent of a buffalo 500, mechanical harvesting80). He harvested 1,815 kilo of rice earning a total of 1,488.30 RMB, at thegovernment set price of 0.82 RMB a kilo, plus a canola crop income of400 RMB. Taking away the capital input and 365.2 RBM state tax, therehe was left with only 525.6 RMB. The net per capita annual income of thefamily of four who worked on the land for a whole year was 131.4 RMB.On top of that the village accountant came to demand 120 RMB for irri-gation ditch costs, 68.85 for building an electric irrigation station, 22.95for irrigation infrastructure repair, 54 for road maintenance, levies thattotalled 301.18 RBM (Chen and Chun 2004).

During his briefing to the media at the National People’s Congressmeeting in 2001, Premier Zhu Rongji declared that the state wouldchange the rural tax system from collecting fees to a unified tax. Zhu saidhe would only impose a tax of about 50 billion RMB instead of thecurrent 120 billion on rural residents. In order to compensate the localgovernments for the loss of income, the central government wouldsubsidize the poorer province with a total of 20 to 30 billion RBM. In fact,as Li Changping (2002) convincingly shows, the real financial expendi-ture of the local governments came to more than 700 billion RBM andabout 70 per cent to 80 per cent of that is raised as taxes and levies fromthe rural residents. Premier Zhu was either blissfully ignorant of thefacts or simply pretended that the problem did not exist.

The rural–urban divide: values and attitudes

A journalist named Mang Bisheng was once approached by a ruralwoman of about 40 who was looking for someone to gao zhuang (tolodge a complaint). She knelt down crying in front of Mang (kneelingin front of someone is an age-old symbolic gesture of humiliation andappeal for addressing injustice). Mang asked to see a written accountof her complaint. The woman, shaking, first took out from a paperwrap something like sinew. It was some tendon that her village headand gangs had taken out of the woman’s feet to stop her from travel-ling to seek justice. Mang was deeply moved and tried to help her toget justice. However, after several attempts, not only was he unable todo anything but he also lost her written document (Mang 2004).

One reader from the Renmin wang e-media chatroom asks a rhetor-ical question: As we urban residents talk about buying cars and about


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taking a holiday abroad do we realize that it is the rural residents whosupport our bid to join the world? (http://www.people. com.cn,accessed 4 February 2004) The Chinese expression of this bid is yu shijiejiegui (literally meaning ‘join the rail track of the world’). This is aslogan that the Chinese political, business and intelligentsia eliteconstantly use to indicate their ambition to be part of the Westernworld in material wealth and life style.

It is quite likely that the urban elite do not realize how much therural people are made to sacrifice for their modernity, because it is notin the realm of public discourse. Even though some do know the extentof what the rural people contribute to their Europeanization of urbancities, they think it is a necessary sacrifice. The following quote fromHuang Ping exemplifies Chinese urban elite thought about the plightof the rural Chinese:

Our conception of society (including that held by those in thegovernment and the majority of the urban residents) holds thatrural China is nothing but a residue of the process of moderniza-tion and is bound to be eradicated. It is backward and should notbe allowed to exist. The 900 million peasants are China’s baggageand burden, a tumour to be removed the earlier the better. Whyshould we invest in rural China? It is not necessary. This is theirview, the view of our government and certain big name scholars.They pay lip service to rural poverty; but what lies deep in theirmind is: let rural China die off and until it does the function ofrural China is 1) vegetable basket, 2) ricebowl and 3) producinga low-quality population. Rural China is the source of humanquality deterioration. Rural construction? No, stop them givingbirth and suppress their revolt instead and that will fix it.

(Huang Ping 2004)

The reason that the post-Mao government did not invest in ruraleducation and rural health was not because there was no money. It wasbecause of their ideology and policy orientation. They believe not onlythat capitalism is the only road to achieve China’s dream of beingstrong and wealthy but also that it is inevitable that the poor and thedisadvantaged masses will have to bear the consequences of what theycall the primitive stage of capital accumulation. These values and atti-tudes, reinforced by the mainstream economists, have held a dominantposition in public discourse ever since the 1980s.

In order to copy the West, or to learn the magic recipe from the West,the central and local governments, the latter led by the former, allo-cated enormous amount of resources for government personnel andofficials to make study or inspection tours abroad. While two-thirds of


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US Congressmen reportedly do not have a passport, it would be hardto find any Chinese officials from the upper middle rank up who havenever been abroad. According to one account (Li Ming 2004), expendi-ture on overseas inspection tours by the Chinese authorities amountsto US$30 billion per year. That would be enough to help 50 millionChinese out of poverty or to pay for the education of 3 million childrenfrom primary school to university.

Since the post-Mao reforms, the key function of the local govern-ments in rural China has been to get money out of the rural people andto stop them from having more children. No wonder a phrase widelyspread among the farmers in Anhui during the late 1990s was: San cuisan hai (Three demands and three hazards). This refers to threedemands from the government – grain, cash and life, the last of whichrefers to family planning – while the three hazards are fire, robbery andgovernment officials.

The situation had become so bad that the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabaoleadership felt that something had to be done. This was indicated bythe People’s Daily, which published a commentary calling for an end tothe quasi-apartheid system, arguing that income gaps have to beclosed. The paper states that:

nine provinces and autonomous regions, plus the vast ruralareas under the jurisdiction of Chongqing Municipality, haveremained appallingly poor. This poverty belt, stretching fromYunnan in the south to Xinjiang in the north, makes up morethan half of China’s land mass and it contains 285 millionpeople – a population bigger than that of the United States.

(People’s Daily 2004b)

This official acknowledgement refers mainly to the poverty-strickennorthwest areas, but not most of the central provinces.

It has been a hard task to persuade the Chinese elite policy makersthat it is morally wrong to have designed an economic developmentplan driven by the aspirations of the urban Chinese citizens for the livingstandard of the developed countries when the majority of the rural resi-dents in inland China are struggling to survive. Although there areincreasing numbers of urban poor, even these urban poor refuse to workfor the same wages and in the same conditions as rural migrant workers– a clear indication of apartheid against the rural population.

Post-Mao reforms: myths versus reality

For a long time since the 1980s there has been a consensus among themajority of the Chinese political and intelligentsia elite that the post-Mao


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destruction of the collective system performed miracles. With this mindset, they either ignored or pretended not to see the reality that could beseen even by a discerning outsider. For instance, Unger (2002) points outthat more than 60 per cent of the increase in rural income between 1978and 1982 was achieved before the commune system was dismantled andthat per capita rural income in 1990 (338 RMB) was barely higher thanin 1984 (336 RMB), and, quoting Scott Rozelle, another China specialist,‘the 1990s witnessed much the same story’ (Unger 2002: 172).

China rural heartland

A sense of rural prosperity during the mid-1980s soon dissipated andthe rural Chinese had to become migrant workers to earn a living. GaoChangxian, my brother in Gao Village, is an example of an ordinaryfarmer in the grain belt area. He used to have a little shop in GaoVillage and, with his wife Gao Mingxia and three children of primaryschool age, they managed well enough and were considered to be welloff in the village in the early 1990s. Gradually, as the children grewbigger and more money was needed for education, the situationbecame progressively worse. Most of the young villagers left and therewere not enough customers to keep the shop going. First GaoChangxian’s wife left for Xiamen as a migrant worker and then hissecond teenage daughter. Finally Gao Changxian himself also had tohead off for Xiamen. Being in their forties and having no qualifications,it was very difficult for Gao Changxian and Gao Mingxia to leave twochildren behind and to live as migrant workers in an urban structurethat treated rural people as non-citizens of their own country (Gao2005). For the urban elite, Gao Changxian and his family, and all theother rural migrants, are either quietly ignored or are seen as deservingof their situation because they are lower-quality human beings and areborn to be beasts of burden for the benefit of high-quality people.

Migrant workers

The dire circumstances of rural migrant workers have been ignoreduntil recently by the media. A major TV event in China since the1980s has been the performance for the Spring Festival New Year’sEve titled Chunjie lianhuan wanhui (Spring Festival Nationwide JointEvening Performance). It is watched not only by the whole urbannation but also by millions of ethnic Chinese overseas. It is so popu-lar and so much part of the contemporary Chinese cultural establish-ment that the annual event is simply referred to as Chun wan (SpringEvening). Usually the programme includes dancing, singing andxiangsheng (a kind of stand-up cross-talk comedy routine), mostly by


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the urban and educated. If rural China is mentioned, it is usually thetopic of jokes and ridicule. In the 2007 Chun wan, for the first timesince the post-Mao reform, a group of children from a Beijingmigrant school set up by the migrants themselves performed apoetry recital on stage to the national audience. According to onecommentator (Fenghua yuan 2007), the poem moved the nation.Here is my translation of the poem:

If you want to ask who I amI am always unwilling to tellBecause we are the butt of your urban children’s jokes.Our school yard is smallNot big enough for a rocking horse;Our campus is non-existent andEvery now and then we are hunted to move from one place toanother.Our lights are dimOur chairs are shaky and creak when we sit on them,But we do our work wellAnd our results are good.We love our mothersBecause they sweep the street of this city for you;We love our fathersBecause they build the skylines of the new century.Others like to compare their parents’ status;We can only hope to compare today with tomorrow.Like you urban peopleWe are also children of ChinaAnd happy New Year to you

In recent years, loss of land has become the main cause of social unrest.The development policies aimed at increasing GDP have led to anincreasing loss of agricultural land and a decline in grain production.The gravity of this situation is illustrated by the case of Pei Lianggengfrom Hebei. Pei used to be a large-scale grain grower and was namedas the ‘National Grain Selling Model’ in 1989 but now he only farms 12mu of land (Xinhua News 2004b). As there is no hope of earning a livingby farming many millions, like Gao Changxian and his family, have toleave their homes to be migrant workers. A migrant worker from ruralChina has to work in appalling conditions for twelve hours a day orlonger (Chan 2003), very often for seven days a week, to earn aboutUS$80 a month. According to McCool (2004), rural migrant ‘workersreceived an average 16.5 cents an hour when the legal minimum inChina was 31 cents an hour.1 The working week was seven days when


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five days was legal and people toiled for up to 20½ hours per shift.’Still hundreds of millions of rural youth leave their home to be migrantworkers.

Shangfang and resistance

Shangfang (to appeal for help from higher authorities) has been aphenomenon in Beijing; the reception office that was officially set up toreceive complaints provides some hope, however illusionary, for hope-less people that they may find some redress of grievance and injustice.According to Xie (2004) there is in Beijing a so-called shangfang villagewhere the shangfang rural people stay temporarily. He claims to knowmore than a hundred peasants who have been imprisoned for theirshangfang activities. One woman, Hao Wenzhong, has been shangfang-ing for 19 years, during which she has been detained 197 times, and wasput into psychiatric hospitals 17 times. On 6 January 2004, four shangfangpeople were arrested and detained by the police in Beijing; according toXinhua News Agency, they were arrested because they committed crim-inal act of organizing other shangfang people to demonstrate on theTian’anmen Square (Niu and Li 2004).

These shangfang activities are very similar to those described intraditional Chinese plays, Peking operas and novels, where they arecalled gao zhuang (lodge a complaint against an official with his supe-rior, Perry 2001). A typical scene portrayed in classical Chineseliterature is lanlu gao zhuang (a victim of injustice would suddenlyappear in the middle of a road, kneel down before the official sedanchair passing by and then submit a written document appealing forredress of an injustice).

There has been increasing resistance, as indicated by Yu Jianrong’sreport (2003), which is an in-depth investigation of one county andfocuses on the form and likely consequences of rural resistance. Ruralprotests, as noted by China scholars such as Bernstein, Perry, Bianco,Gilley and Unger, actually started as early as the 1980s, the perceivedgolden age of post-Mao rural reform (O’Brien 2002). According to Yu therural residents were so desperate that they were organizing themselves.This was such a sobering reminder to the Chinese leadership that Yu wasgiven a million-dollar research grant to study the problem (Ye 2004).

In the county that Yu has investigated there is a core group of 80people known as the Jian fu daibiao or Jian fu shangfang daibiao (Represen-tatives on reduction of tax and levy burdens, or Representatives forappeals to the superior authorities). They are middle-aged men whohave been educated to junior middle school or above, and most haveserved in the army or have been migrant workers. They know what theyare doing and have some access to social resources, and they are ready


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to make significant sacrifices, including imprisonment or even death.They are regarded as ‘heroes’ by the villagers, who would even protectthem by fighting with the police or by raiding local government offices.However, the villagers are very careful not to have any overt organiza-tion and therefore do not have any written records of their meetings ormemberships. At one stage, representatives from different villages evenheld meetings in the capital city of Hunan, and in a January 2003 the 27representatives there called for the establishment of a Nongmin xiehui(Peasant association).2

Whenever the villagers have some grievance they go to these repre-sentatives rather than any state-authorized organizations. What isironic is that the ultimate authority on which this kind of resistancerelies is the central government of the CCP. These informal and quasi-unofficial organizations resort to central government documents,published laws and regulations to justify their resistance to taxes andlevies, and their actions against corrupted local officials (O’Brien 2002).These representatives have also developed clever ways of organizingtheir activities. One is to set up a loudspeaker in a market place tobroadcast the central government documents that mandate reductionsin tax burdens and laws against corruptions.

Theirs is not the passive daily resistance of the weak, but resistanceorganized along the lines of upholding the laws and regulations of thestate and of the party. According to Yu, the state has been losing itscontrol at grassroots level and if appropriate policies are not taken heishili (black forces: local ruffians and scoundrels) will take over by infil-trating the existing local governments, or new organizations wouldadopt measures such as kidnapping and blackmailing. It appears thatthe Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao leadership took Yu’s report seriously. Oneyear after the report of 2003 the central government started abolishing allagricultural taxes, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

Conclusion: the state and the countryside

It is unlikely there will be any large-scale nongmin qiyi (peasantuprising) in contemporary China. However, Maoist radicalism has leftits legacy. One aspect of that legacy, as Yu’s study shows, is that therural people have become politically more conscious and more active.Currently, migration to urban areas is acting as a safety valve. Withoutit, resistance would have been more intensive and extensive. Anotheraspect of the Maoist legacy is that some (though not many) of theurban elite who are now in their fifties, having lived and worked inrural China, are ready to speak on behalf of the rural poor. Chen andChun are actually following in the footsteps of a few educated Chinesein the Mao era who began to look into the life of the most disadvan-


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taged in China. Others I have mentioned include Li Changping, YuJianrong and Cao Jingqing. But as early as 1968 an educated youthfrom Beijing, Zhang Musheng, wrote a manuscript Zhongguo nongminwenti xuexi: guanyu Zhongguo zhidu de yanjiu (A study of Chinese ruralproblems: a research study of the Chinese system), which questions theChinese government’s exploitation of the peasantry. The manuscriptwas circulated widely in the form of mimeographs and handwrittencopies (Yang Jian 2002).

Finally, let me point out an insight of Wang Xiaotao (2004) toconclude this chapter. Wang rejects Vivienne Shue’s (1988) thesis thatlocal rural officials are also rational actors defending the interest of thelocal residents, Helen Siu’s (1989) argument that these officials areloyal to the state, and Jean Oi’s (1989) argument that rural local officialsact both as agents of the state and as representatives of local interests.Rather he argues that the conflict in rural China is no longer betweenthe state and farmers, but between farmers and local officials. It is thestate that has to face the dilemma of choosing between them. In otherwords, the local officials do not represent farmers, nor are they agentsof the state. They have rapidly become a powerful class of their own.Whether the state can mould them into state agents who are institu-tionally accountable is a crucial question for the stable development ofrural China. The so-called grassroots democracy – village elections thathave been experimented and have been supported internationally, forexample by the Carter Foundation – has so far failed to achieve such anoutcome.


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10 The battle of China’shistory: seeing the pastfrom the present

Introduction: a little incident

On 26 June 2005, in Chizhou City of Anhui province, a Honda vehiclebumped into Liu Liang. Following this accident, the driver of the vehicle,a businessman named Mr Wu who runs a private hospital, and Liu Liangstarted to argue, and the argument quickly developed into a physicalfight. One of Mr Wu’s companions in the car, a hospital security guard,reportedly beat Liu up. Liu was later taken to a hospital to be treated forhis injuries. However, a rumour soon spread around the area that Liu hadbeen beaten to death, and tens of thousands of local residents surroundedthe police station where Mr Wu and his companions were being held. Theprotesters demanded that the police handover the detainees because theybelieved that the police were protecting Mr Wu, a rich businessman.When the police refused this demand, some of the protesters turned theHonda over and burned it, and then proceeded to do the same to a policecar. They then burned the police station and robbed a supermarketbecause its boss was rumoured to have given soft drinks to the police.According to newspaper reports, the incident developed so fast because:first, Mr Wu declared that it did not matter if Liu was beaten to death – allhe had to do was to pay 300,000 RMB (about US$4,000); and second, thepolice were perceived to be protecting the rich (Reuters 2005).

This kind of incident is commonplace in present-day China, and itsharply highlights a sense of popular antagonism towards the rich andthe police. It does not matter what really happened. It does not matter,for example, who was responsible for the car accident, whether Liureally died, whether the boss of the supermarket was colluding withthe police, or whether Mr Wu had three bodyguards who beat up ayoung student (in fact Liu was not young, nor was he a student). It wasthe perception that the rich were taking over and the police were ontheir side that mattered. Since 1999, Chizhou City has implementedpolicies to attract capital by setting investment quotas as a perform-ance indicator for every level of government bureaucracy. Newspaperreports suggest that it was popular opinion that businessmen fromShanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang had taken over land in Chizhou fordevelopment, with little or no compensation being paid to the localcommunity (Reuters 2005).

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In the context of evaluating the Cultural Revolution, this chapter,like the previous one, further appraises the post-Mao reforms. In suchan appraisal the issue of whether life is better for the Chinese ingeneral at the beginning of the twenty-first century will be dealt withbriefly. The chapter then asks how far and in what way China has‘gone capitalist’. It will also examine whether and how Maoist socialistlegacies still matter in China. Finally, the chapter finishes with a briefdiscussion of how ordinary workers and farmers see the Mao era incomparison to what has been happening since the post-Mao reforms

Three questions about the post-Mao reforms

When talking about the achievements of the post-Mao reforms, it isoften taken for granted by the media that life for people in present-dayChina is better than it has ever been. But there are people such as theunemployed, the sick, the weak and millions and millions of ruralpeople who would argue that by the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury life has deteriorated to its worst point in the history of thePRC. This discrepancy of opinion reflects not only the growing socioe-conomic stratification of contemporary Chinese society but alsodifferences in beliefs and values.

Most prominent Chinese CCP leaders, from Zhou Enlai to DengXiaoping and from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, are nationalists ratherthan communists, and their overwhelming aspiration has been tomake China strong and wealthy. Like many revolutionaries in devel-oping countries, political radicalism for many Chinese revolutionarieswas a means to an end of national unity and a wealthy China. If marketcapitalism is the way to achieve this end, then by all means go for it.

Mao too was a Chinese nationalist. However, it can be argued thatfor Mao national unity and national wealth were not just ends in them-selves. Mao was a post-Lenin Marxist who wanted to open up a pathfor new politics (Badiou 2005, Bosteels 2005). Some ideas experimentedwith during the Cultural Revolution were Maoist attempts to createnew subjectivity (Wang Hui 2006). Maoism, including many of theideas of the Cultural Revolution, contributed to the imagination ofmodernity without capitalism (Amin 2006). It can be argued that therationale of the Cultural Revolution is that cultural transformation iscrucial to the consolidation of social and political change (Dirlik 2006).Deng, on the other hand, would embrace any way, black cat or whitecat, in order to make China strong and wealthy. Thus, there is a crucialdifference between Mao’s vision and what Deng Xiaoping wanted tosee in China. Even in terms of material civilization it is not unequivo-cally clear that China is stronger and wealthier at the beginning of thetwenty-first century. Yes China is wealthier, but not necessarily


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stronger. For many, China is unstable and is weaker when facing theglobal capitalist onslaught.

In the context of these issues there are three questions that need tobe asked about the post-Mao reforms. The first is to what extent mate-rial improvement in the post-Mao reform years should be attributed tothe Mao era. The second question is who benefits most from the post-Mao economic development. The third question is what approach andwhat kind of development is good for the quality of human life inChina, and whether this kind of development can be sustained.

Who planted the seeds of the post-Mao era?

One indication of positive development is that millions of Chinesehave been lifted out of absolute poverty in the past three decades. It isan undisputable fact that even the rural people at the bottom of theChinese society, rural people like those who have been described in mybook Gao Village (Gao 1999a), are better fed and clothed since the 1980s.It is an undisputable fact that even basic daily necessities such as a barof soap were rationed during the Mao era. So why is there abundancein the reforms years as opposed to scarcity under Mao? The answer tothis question is related to the first question raised above, that is, towhat extent did the Mao era contribute to subsequent economic devel-opments? This question has already been addressed in various formsin previous chapters.

Who benefits most from the post-Mao reform?

Regarding the second question new evidence suggests that ‘China’spoorest [have become] worse off after the boom’ (McGregor 2006).According to a recent estimate based on official Chinese data andanalysed by the UN:

From 2001 to 2003, as China’s economy expanded nearly 10 percent a year, average income for the poorest 10 per cent of thecountry’s households fell 2.5 per cent. Those roughly 130million Chinese earn $1 a day or less, the World Bank’s globalbenchmark for poverty.

(Batson and Oster 2006)

What development can be sustained and better for the quality oflife?

In relation to the third question raised above, it is worth consideringwhose economic development it is and for what purposes. China focuses

T H E B AT T L E O F C H I N A’S H I S TO RY

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on export-orientated capital accumulation (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett2007) and has become the world’s ‘manufacturing shop floor’, but whatgood is that for the Chinese when China is just a sweatshop thatproduces cheap goods for other countries, especially wealthier Westerncountries? Most of these ‘made in China’ commodities are destined formarkets outside China and are therefore not available in China. ‘China’sexports to the United States account for about half of its total exports’,an estimate based on direct and indirect measures, that is, includinggoods re-exported from other countries (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett2007: 19). ‘According to Morgan Stanley, low-cost Chinese imports(mainly textiles, shoes, toys, and household goods) have saved USconsumers (mostly middle- and low-income families) about $100 billiondollars since China’s reforms began in 1978’ (Gilboy 2004).

China does not really own this factory either. Most enterprises andmanufacturing facilities are owned by foreign firms, companies or multi-nationals who take the lion’s share of the profit. ‘In 2005, not only didforeign-invested companies account for 58 per cent of total exports byvalue from China, they controlled a remarkable 88 per cent of exports inhigh-tech categories’ (Miller 2006). It is therefore obvious that much ofthe purported development is not really for the direct benefit of mostordinary Chinese such as the rural people. And, although figures suchas 100 million Internet users and 300 million mobile phone users inChina are impressive, they are not that significant in relative terms in thecontext of China’s nearly 1.4 billion people.

There is certainly a genuine sense that China is on the rise on theinternational stage, and the country’s economic development has ledto a fear of China. That fear can be seen by US headline publicationssuch as The Coming Conflict with China (Bernstein and Munro 1997),Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America (Santoli2002) and Seeds of Fire: China and the Story behind the Attack on America(Thomas 2001). For many Chinese however, as discussed in the e-media debate chapters, China has become demonstrably weaker as thepost-Mao reform policies took roots. China always bows to US pres-sure and the Chinese government is impotent when it is bullied by theUnited States. To support their view, the critics point out that theUnited States continues to sell arms to Taiwan despite China’s protests;that the United States forced a Chinese cargo ship, Yinhe, to be searchedin international waters; that the United States deliberately bombed theChinese embassy in Belgrade; and that a US spy plane could force thedestruction of a Chinese fighter jet and the death of its pilot yet still beallowed to land on Chinese territory. If China has any bargainingstrength in international relations it is her nuclear power and missilecapacities. And these capacities are the legacies of the Mao era.

As for the fact that China had overtaken Japan as the largest holder


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of foreign currency reserves in the world (US$863 billion as opposed toUS$860 billion) by 2006, it not only shows a weakness of China but alsothe obscenity of the global capitalist system. To earn these so-calledforeign currency reserves, China has been trapped by a system thatfavours the rich against the poor. Millions of China’s migrant workersliterally shed their blood and sweat to subsidize the wasteful consump-tion of citizens of the United States and other wealthy Western nations,as shown in Mardi Gras Made in China, a film by Redmon (2006). Whenthe US dollar depreciates, as it is doing at the time of this writing, thevalue of China’s dollar reserves vanishes into thin air.

Is China a capitalist country? And does it matter?

Whether China is a capitalist country and whether this matters isrelated to all the three questions raised above. When Mao launched theCultural Revolution in 1966 the overriding ideological rationale was toprevent ‘capitalist roaders’, that is, CCP officials in high positions whohad capitalist ideas and tendencies, from ‘restoring capitalism’. DengXiaoping was criticized and deposed as the CCP’s ‘number twocapitalist roader’ (the number one being Liu Shaoqi, a former chairmanof the PRC). Deng wrote a couple of self-criticisms, and in one of thesehe swore that he would never reverse the verdict of the CulturalRevolution (Deng 1972). In 1976, when Deng was made to criticizehimself once again, Mao reportedly said: ‘Oh yeah, “[Deng said] neverreverse the verdict”, we cannot rely on his words.’

While many may not agree with Mao’s ideas, policies and theirassociated practices, it is hard not to conclude that Mao was correct inhis perception of Deng Xiaoping. For, if China was socialist to anydegree after the 1949 Revolution, it has now changed beyond all recog-nition, and this change is largely due to Deng and his follow capitalistroaders, who, it should be noted, were criticized and humiliatedduring the Cultural Revolution for the kind of ideas and tendenciesfound in them (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2005a, Hinton 1990). Putanother way, if it is possible to argue that China of the Maoist era wasa two-way street – that is, it could either move towards real socialism,which is what the Cultural Revolution was designed to do, or movetowards full-scale capitalism (Sweezy and Bettelheim 1972) – then, itappears to have been moving irreversibly towards the latter since thelate 1980s, due to post-Mao reforms.

Inequality and the social status of the working class

There are three major lines of argument to suggest either that China isalready a capitalist country or that it is well on its way to being a


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significant player in the capitalist world. The first holds that market forcesand profit seeking have driven the continuing decline of the social statusof the working class and resulted in increasing inequality (Chan 2001, Satoand Li 2005, Wang Shaoguang 2003). As Blecher (2006) explains:

Karl Marx urged the workers of the world to unite. ‘The proletar-ians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world towin.’ China’s workers, however, have lost their world. In theMaoist period, they were an exalted, pampered, and yet, paradox-ically, extremely radical class. Under China’s structural reforms ofthe past two decades, they have fallen fast and hard. Employmentsecurity is nonexistent and unemployment is rampant. For thosefortunate enough to have dodged the axe, wages have not keptpace with those of other sectors or with inflation, and poverty –particularly ‘deep poverty’ – is skyrocketing. State-supplied hous-ing, medical care, and education have declined in quality andavailability, and increased in cost to workers.

No one really knows how many millions are unemployed in Chinatoday. According to one estimate, the current unemployment rate is14 per cent among urban permanent residents. This figure is based onsurvey data collected by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, anddoes not include the rural population. Though millions of ruralmigrant workers are employed in sweatshops, the economic reformmeasures have meant reduction of employment in the urban sector.According to an International Labour Organization study quoted byHart-Landsberg and Burkett (2007), between 1990 and 2002, regularformal wage employment in China’s urban sector declined at anannual rate of 3 per cent and employment in state and collectiveenterprises fell by 59.2 million over the 13 year period.

Liu Jian (2005), the Director of the State Council Poverty Aid Office,suggests that the number of people who fell below the official povertyline actually increased by 800,000 in 2004. The official poverty line,according to Liu, was by 2005 an annual income of 637 RMB (less thanUS$80), which means 53 RMB (about US$6) a month, or 1.8 RMB aday.1 Based on this criterion, the minimum amount of social securitypayment to urban residents was set at 56 RMB a month, just above thepoverty line. In terms of purchasing power in China, 1.8 RMB is justabout enough to buy a bowl of the cheapest noodles – but only in acounty town, not in big cities like Shanghai (Liu Jian 2005).

Even for those who are fortunate enough to have a job there is clearevidence that the working people are subjected to the treatment of an‘underclass’. Lee (2007), for instance, reports how workers – be they insur-ance salespersons or bar hostesses – are manipulated into serving the


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profit-seeking capitalist economy in post-Mao China. On the other hand,there is opulence for the few. According to Lardy (2006), total worldwidesales of Bentley automobiles in 2003 came to 200, with 70 of them sold inChina at 2 million RMB each: 250 times the average urban income.

Polarization between the rich and poor in present-day China is offi-cially admitted to have crossed the danger line of social unrest. China’sGini co-efficient, a standard international measurement of incomeinequality, reached 0.454 in 2002, far above 0.4, which is the thresholdgenerally considered a cause for concern. A recent study by Wang Xiaolu(2007) suggests that income disparity is in fact much worse. The offi-cially available statistics, on which the World Bank-recognized 0.454Gini co-efficient was based, did not take into account what Wang calls‘grey income’, which is monopolized by the 10 per cent of China’s high-est income households. According to Wang’s study, in urban areas theincome of the 10 per cent of the highest income households is not thewidely accepted nine times but 31 times higher than that of the poorest10 per cent. If rural and urban areas are combined in this calculation, thedifference is 51 times.

Even though members of the urban working class have beenconfronting a deteriorating situation (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett2007), few if any at all are willing to take up the kind of jobs and levelsof pay that are associated with migrant rural workers in urban centres(Bian 1994). For migrant workers from rural China the monthly wagesof factory workers in 2003 ranged between $62 and $100, only margin-ally higher than in 1993. To earn this meagre wage, millions of ruralChinese not only have to work under appalling conditions but alsohave to leave their families; an estimated 20 million children have beenleft behind in this way (Kwong 2006)

Privatization of the economy

The second perspective from which one can argue that China is a capital-ist country is to note that China is in the process of being further priva-tized: the means of production are increasingly being handed over toprivate ‘business entrepreneurs’. Although major and strategic industryand infrastructure such as banks, telecommunication, railways and themilitary are still owned by the state, China is preparing for a more radicalprocess of privatization. Indications are that everything but the military,telecommunications and energy industries, along with some parts of thetransportation sector, will be opened to private competition (Pomfret2000). According to a report partly funded by the World Bank, privatebusiness already accounted for more than half of China’s economy in2000. Similarly, Ross Garnaut of the Australian National University andSong Ligang of Beijing University estimate that officially registered


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private firms, foreign enterprises and family farms made up 50 per centof the Chinese economy as early as 1998, with that share rising to 62 percent if private firms that were still officially labelled collectives werecounted (Garnault and Song 2000). Multinational corporations nowaccount for 34 per cent of Chinese industrial output, which is greater thanthe 30 per cent share attributed to state-owned enterprises, and thepercentage of the former keeps growing (Wang 2003).

Joining the transnational capitalist world

The third perspective from which one can argue that China is eitheralready a capitalist country or rapidly moving towards it is that Chinaincreasingly is run by transnational capitalist firms (Hart-Landsbergand Burkett 2007). Take the automobile industry as a case in point.Nowadays, all the important car production plants in China are ownedby either foreign companies or joint venture companies. Professor HuXingdou (2005) argues that by making China the sweatshop of theworld, the developed West not only exploits cheap Chinese labour butalso Chinese intellectual and knowledge sources. He asks his audienceto think of the example of Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta, whereon a car journey from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, from Zhuhai toFoshan, a journey of thousands of miles, one would see nothing but anendless stream of factories. But according to Hu, even with a manufac-turing industry of this scale, the total GDP of Guangdong is no greaterthan the profits of a multinational company like McDonald’s.

One commentator calls this kind of development the Dongguanmodel and increasingly Suzhou and even Wenzhou are movingtowards it (Jin Xinyi 2005). Suzhou used to have its own industry andproduct brands such the Xiangxuehai refrigerator, Kongque television,Chunhua vacuum cleaners and Changcheng electric fans. These localbrands have now disappeared. The Xiangxuehai refrigerator disap-peared after its manufacturer entered into a joint venture with aSouthern Korean company, Sansung; the Kongque television disap-peared after its makers entered into a joint venture with the Dutchcorporation, Phillips (Han Yanming 2004).

The strategy employed by foreign companies is first to enter into ajoint venture with an existing Chinese enterprise and demand the bestassets, tax and infrastructure concessions while making use of Chineselabour and expertise. They then use their technological and financialadvantages to squeeze the Chinese partners out of the enterprise. Thishappened to Xibei Bearing Co Ltd with a German company FAG, toNingxia Machine Co Ltd with a Japanese company, to a petroleumequipment company in a joint venture with an American company,and to the Lanzhou Camera Plant with a Japanese company.2


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The following examples show how the profits are shared whenforeign firms operate in China. A Barbie doll may sell in the US marketat a retail price of US$10, but its FOB price from China is only US$2, ofwhich US$1 is for management and transportation costs. Of the otherUS$1 spent in China, 65 cents are spent on materials. Only 35 cents areleft for the Chinese workers to share. Similarly, Han Yanming (2004)notes that a factory in Suzhou produces 20 million computer mouses ayear for Logitech International SA to sell to the US market for US$40apiece. Logitech takes US$8, distributors and retailers take US$15, and afurther US$14 is paid for the materials and parts. The Chinese side getsonly US$3, which includes the cost of labour, electricity, transportationand so on.

Another example of how the transnational capitalist chain exploitsChinese labour is a case study reported by China Labor Watch. A Pumashoe factory run by a Taiwan businessman employs about 30,000 work-ers in Guangdong; the retail price of a pair of its shoes in the UnitedStates ranges from US$65 to US$110. The average Chinese worker getspaid US$1.09 per pair, while Puma spends US$6.78 per pair on advertis-ing. The retail value of the shoes made by a worker in one week equalsall the money paid to him or her for a whole year. The average hourlywage rate paid to a Chinese worker is 31 US cents, while the profit thecompany makes from each Chinese worker is US$12.24 per hour. Theworkers regularly have to work from 7.30am to 9.00pm, but sometimeshave to work overtime until 12pm with no increase in the hourly rate.Sometimes they do not even get paid at all for overtime. They have aone-hour break for lunch and an hour and a half for dinner. They sleepin the factory compound, with twelve people in one room and one bath-room for 100 people to share. They are not allowed to talk at work andcannot leave the factory compound without permission. The penalty forarriving five minutes late at work is the deduction of three hours’ pay.There are no regulations on workplace health and safety conditions inthe factory (China Labor Watch 2004).

Joint ventures not only make profits but also shift production rela-tions in China. In an in-depth study of two key model joint ventures,Chin (2003) finds that there has been a significant shift to capitalistsocial relations of production in China’s joint venture sector. The studysuggests that China’s foreign-invested sectors operate according to thelogic of capitalist accumulation, or ‘accumulation by dispossession’coined by David Harvey, and that a hegemonic regime of labourcontrol has developed in these ventures. The 1995 Chinese Labour Lawhas specific stipulations to protect workers’ rights and working condi-tions (Du Guang 2005). But privilege and concessions are allowed toexempt foreign companies from the Labour Law. Such labour conces-sions were first made in special economic zones, but were later


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extended throughout the country, and now the Chinese Labour Lawdoes not bind Chinese private enterprises either.

It is frequently argued that China’s embrace of transnationalcompanies is a necessary step towards upgrading its industrial andtechnological sophistication; the growth of China’s production andexport of electronic and information technology goods is cited as anexample (Lange 2005). But as Branstetter and Lardy (2006), cited inHart-Landsberg and Burkett (2007), argue, these electronic products –produced in huge volumes at low unit costs – are not really high-techand China does not really produce them. Rather China assembles themfrom imported parts and components which make up 85 per cent of thevalue of the exported products. Moreover these products are largelyassembled in foreign-invested firms. In 2003, for example, foreign-invested firms accounted for approximately 75 per cent of China’sexports of electronic and telecommunication goods and 90 per cent ofits exports of computer-related goods.

Return and rise of the comprador

The way foreign firms are allowed to operate without labour or environ-mental conditions reminds one of pre-1949 Treaty System through whichforeign companies and Chinese compradors enriched themselves. Theterm ‘comprador’ is sometimes used to describe the way in which Chinais now part of global capitalism. William Hinton (1993), in a response toTang Zongli’s rhetorical question ‘Is China Returning to Semi-ColonialStatus?’, uses the term maiban (comprador or purveyor) to denote whathas been happening in post-Mao China. This reference to the term‘comprador’ as a means of explaining the nature of Chinese develop-ment provides two insights. One is that Chinese compradors in EastAsia, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, are coming back to mainlandChina (Heartfield 2004). The second insight is that China’s political, busi-ness and intellectual elites are acting on behalf of transnational interestsand to benefit themselves in the process.

In the most comprehensive study of the Chinese comprador beforethe 1940s, Yen-p’ing Hao defines a comprador as the ‘Chinese managerof a foreign firm in China, serving as a middleman in the company’sdealings with the Chinese’ (Hao 1970: 1). The rise of a comprador class,he continues, was a product of the Treaty System, ‘which providedplaces and opportunities for Chinese and foreign merchants to pursuetheir calling’ (Hao 1970: 9). The concessions offered to transnationalcompanies in the special economic zones are in many ways similar tothe pre-1949 treaty ports where special privileges were offered toforeign firms.

Chinese compradors, who fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan after the


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communist victory in 1949, or their descendants, have returned. Busi-nesspeople from Hong Kong or Taiwan, who know how to bribebureaucrats and how to exploit cheap labour because of their culturaland language advantages, skilfully play this comprador role. Thegeneral picture is that a Western company has the soft technology, suchas design and marketing, and the comprador manages the productionand supplies the products to the company. Companies like Nike, forinstance, demonstrate considerable concern about design and selling,but little concern when it comes to how their products are made. Thecompradors take orders from Nike and are slave drivers in China whosupply cheap shoes to Nike.

Apart from the return of pre-1949 compradors there has been a rise ofnew Chinese compradors who are engaged with trade or who work forforeign firms. Those people either directly control the trade or smooththe greasy operations for foreign firms and reap rewards in the process.The end result is that a few Chinese get rich but the state gets virtuallynothing in return. In spite of special treatment of tax concessions such asno tax for the first five years of operation and lower tax rates thanrequired for Chinese firms, foreign enterprises still uses Chinese admin-istrative and legal loopholes to avoid tax. According to a recent study bythe Chinese Bureau of Statistics, up to 2005 two-thirds of all the foreignfirms claimed losses (Zhonghua gongshang shibao, 28 March 2007; see alsoFuxi 2007). One of the ways of doing this is ‘transfer pricing’, that is,inflating the prices of imported goods and deflating the prices of theassembled commodities that are mostly exported. The Chinesecompradors are rewarded in the process when they help the transna-tional companies exploit the tax loopholes. According to Chinese officialsources, ‘tax evasion by multinationals costs the country 30 billion yuan(US$3.88 billion) in tax revenue each year’ (Chung 2007).

The Chinese compradors also use a two-tier system to create theirown ‘foreign companies’ by first transferring funds overseas as invest-ments in ‘suitcase’ or ‘paper’ companies, and then repatriating them asforeign investment in China. According to Mei Xinyu, a seniorresearcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade andEconomic Cooperation under the Ministry of Commerce, ‘of China’sutilized FDI of $72.4 billion in 2005, a third was Chinese investmentoverseas that came back disguised as foreign capital take advantage ofthe tax breaks’ (Chung 2007).3

Many of the sons and daughters of the CCP office holders, the‘princelings’, have joined the comprador class in its rise. According toGilley (1998), Jiang Mianheng, son of the former General Secretary ofthe CCP, who gained a doctorate from Drexel University in Philadel-phia, become a key player in Shanghai business, starting with thecity-owned investment firm Shanghai Alliance Investment, serving on


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the board of China Netcom, which relied on him to ease its waythrough government regulatory agencies. Jiang also served as the chiefexecutive officer of Shanghai Simteck Industrials, a telecommunica-tions company. Though Jiang was whisked away to Beijing to becomevice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999, heremained active in business and was responsible in 2000 for puttingtogether an alliance between Simteck and Shanghai Alliance Invest-ment and Taiwan’s Hung Jun Group to build a semiconductor plant inShanghai with an initial investment of $US 75 million. Jiang also engi-neered a deal between Simteck and Shang Chulan groups which makeappliances and computer products (Gilley 1998). There is also evidencethat Jiang played a comprador role for the media tycoon RupertMurdoch for the latter’s business venture in China (Kahn 2007). MrMurdoch also had business dealing with Ding Yuchen, the son of DingGuangen, a long-time Chinese central government propaganda chief(Kahn 2007). Simon Jiang, son of Qiao Shi (another powerful CCPfigure), was involved with LyberCity Holdings and the software firmZi Corporation. He developed plans for a major high-technology busi-ness park in Shenzhen. Zhu Rongji’s son Zhu Yunlai was connectedwith the Bank of China group in Hong Kong (Gilley 2001a).

According to a Chinese official report (Yang Tao 2007), in a couple ofyears a large number of state-owned enterprises have been transferred toprivate owners. Many of the enterprise owners are actually state employ-ers holding government managerial and professional positions, and theproportion of this group of enterprise owners rose from 33.8 per cent ofthe total in 2004 to 67.4 per cent in 2006. This huge transfer of wealth fromthe state to the private sector, unprecedented in human history andcarried through quietly and almost unnoticed, has been largely beneficialto those who hold political power and have connections with the estab-lishment. According to one report, which claims to be based on officialresearch done jointly by the Research Office of the State Council, theResearch Office of the Central Party School and the Chinese Academy ofSocial Sciences, 90 per cent of the more than 3,000 billionaires in Chinaare the so-called ‘princelings’, sons and daughters of high-ranking partyofficials (Boxun 2006a). These people became rich by charging commis-sions for FDI, by taking the difference when imported equipment waspriced above the level of the international market, by exporting andimporting rare commodities, by property speculation, land seizure andbanking, by smuggling luxury cars, by contracting for large projects, andby using inside information to manipulate the stock and financialmarkets.

Like the compradors of pre-revolution China, the current Chinesebusiness elite and the bureaucrats who side with capital are not ‘inde-pendent merchants’ per se. Like the pre-1949 compradors, their


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contemporary counterparts have become the nouveaux riches by virtueof their salaries, commissions, and exploitation; only a minority haverisen by virtue of their own business abilities. Like many of the famouscompradors who purchased official titles such as daotai (upper middlerank official) during the Qing China, contemporary compradors arealso given titles such as representatives of the National People’sCongress at county, city, province and central levels, and many of thesebusiness elite actually hold CCP party membership cards. Not unliketheir predecessors, contemporary compradors want their children tobe educated in Western ways, and hundreds of thousands of youngstudents are being sent to the United States, the UK, Australia andother Western countries to study.

Many of this comprador class hold or seek foreign passports orresidency status. Capital flight from China, according to some esti-mates, has been exceeding the levels of FDI since the late 1990s.According to a release by the Assistant Minister of the ChineseMinistry of Public Security, 4,000 ‘corrupt’ Chinese officials had fledthe country with a total capital of $US50 billion by 2005 (CaoyanJushi 2005). In short, the role of the comprador in the chain of theworld capitalist system offers yet another demonstration that Chinais basically a capitalist country

Capitalism with Chinese characteristics?

Wang Hui (2005), one of the sharpest observers of contemporaryChinese politics and society in China, thinks that China is caughtbetween ‘misguided socialism and crony capitalism, and is sufferingfrom the worst of both systems’. While the Chinese authorities like toclaim that their path of development is ‘socialism with Chinese charac-teristics’, some commentators think ‘capitalism with Chinesecharacteristics’ is more appropriate (Chin 2003). Some commentatorswould refer to China’s development since the 1980s as either cronycapitalism or gangster capitalism (Holmstrom and Smith 2000). Oneveteran China watcher has defined it as ‘high-tech feudalism withChinese characteristics’ (Kwong 2006).

The Chinese authorities claim the PRC can still be consideredsocialist because most of the important means of production are stillowned by the state. But state ownership per se does not necessarilymean socialism. Many of the major means of production in capitalistcountries, such as France or the UK (before Margaret Thatcher), wereowned by the state. In any case the notion of state capitalism has beenfrequently used to refer to the former Soviet Union (Chattopadhyay1994, Fernandez 1997, Haynes 2002, Resnick and Wolff 2002), and thenotion can equally apply to China.


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Social stratification

Regarding social stratification in the urban sector in the Mao era, it istrue that there was no business and economic elite class. But there wasa political and professional elite class who had all kinds of entitlements(Yang Jiang 2003) despite Mao’s political movements aimed at them.Since the post-Mao reforms, however, the privilege and entitlements ofthe political and professional elite class have been restored and encour-aged to grow. Furthermore, Deng’s policy of ‘let some get rich first’ hasresulted in the creation of a business elite class.

Deterioration of working conditions encouraged by the state

Even today, no state-owned enterprises in China would allow the kindof penal labour disciplines and harmful working conditions thatprevail in privately owned firms (Chan 2001, Weil 2006). Westerncompanies’ hypocrisy and Chinese authorities’ complicity can be illus-trated by an open letter to President Jiang Zemin, jointly written by theCEOs of Phillips-Van-Heusen, Reebok, and Levi Strauss in 1999, whichrequested a meeting to discuss the possibility of ‘working together’ toimprove labour rights in China (Emerson 2000). The sincerity of thisrequest is open to question precisely because the letter was ‘open’. It ismeant to serve the purpose of presenting an image of the companies as‘caring’ to their Western customers. The intention of spinning isconfirmed by the fact that McDonald’s in China tried to preventworkers in its franchises from forming trade unions, the fact that ‘fast-food giants McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Pizza Huthave been caught underpaying their young workforce in China by asmuch as 40 per cent below the already abysmal legal minimum wage’(Kolo 2007) and the fact that the multinationals lobbied in 2007 todelete or reduce the force of terms in favour of workers when theChinese government attempted to introduce a labour law so thatworkers are in some way protected by contact (Shafer 2007).4

In any case, the Chinese government showed no interest in talkingto the three CEOs (Emerson 2000). In fact, the plight of the migrantworkers is not what concerns the Chinese authorities. The Chineseruling elite at every level has been competing to lure outside capital bygiving preferential treatments to capital and would side with capitalwhenever and wherever there is a labour dispute. Although Chineselabour law stipulates that the maximum working week should notexceed 44 hours, one case study shows that workers in factories thatproduce shoes for Clarks and Skechers may work as long as 81 hoursa week (Zhong Dajun 2005). This, of course, is not an isolated case.Many studies have demonstrated the horrifying working conditions


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for migrant workers (Solinger 1999, Gao 1999a, Gao 2004, Chan 2003and Weil 2006). When there is a dispute between a worker and a capi-talist the Chinese authorities would be more likely to intervene onbehalf of capital. When a party official in Guangdong was asked by aChinese Central TV journalist why, in a dispute between a foreign-owned enterprise and a Chinese migrant worker, he ordered the judgeto rule in favour of the foreign capitalist owner the party officialreplied: ‘We have so many migrant workers but not many capitalists tochoose from. Don’t we need to speak on behalf of capitalists for devel-opment? Development is the core value and that was Deng Xiaoping’sinstruction’ (Zhai 2006).

The urban sector and the urban poor

Another characteristic of contemporary Chinese capitalism is theincreasing reduction of social security for urban residents. UrbanChinese used to have very good social security provisions, but nowthey have to pay contributions towards education and healthcare thatused to be free. To all intents and purposes millions of rural migrantworkers are part of the urban sector, as they have been living andworking there for about three decades. But they are not allowed tosend their children to state schools in cities unless they can pay a feethat is beyond any except the very rich. In Shanghai, for instance,because of its negative population growth, the school population hasbeen shrinking. But local authorities chose to merge schools or simplyclose them down rather than enrol the children of migrant workers.When I put this issue to Professor Xu Mingqi at the Institute of WorldEconomy of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences his answer was:‘Well, even in the United States there is the Green Card system’.

Land seizures

Another defining characteristic of contemporary Chinese capitalism isthat land has increasingly been confiscated with little or no compensa-tion, often by private firms. Again, this differs from the policies ofother developing countries that practise conventional capitalism. It isdifferent because, under the Constitution, land in China is owned bythe state and no private individual is allowed to own land. Even forresidential housing the ownership entitlement of land covers only theright of use. The Chinese authorities sometimes cite this as an illustra-tion of the superiority of socialism when compared with India whereprivate ownership of land is the norm. The Chinese authorities boastthat China can build highways quickly whereas law suits and settle-ment of land use in India would make development too complex if not


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virtually impossible. Indeed, some Chinese economists endorse thekind of land confiscation that is currently taking place as China’snecessary ‘land enclosure’, comparable with what occurred in the UKduring its early stage of industrialization.

Environmental destruction

Another salient characteristic of Chinese capitalism in the 1980s and1990s was the almost total disregard, whether intentional or uninten-tional, for the environment. The following is the testimonial of Pan Yu,Vice-Minister of China’s State Environment Protection Administration:

This spring, the State Environmental Protection Administrationproduced the country’s first official estimate of GDP adjusteddownward for environmental losses. According to these calcu-lations, it would cost $84 billion to clean up the pollutionproduced in 2004, or 3 per cent of GDP for that year. But morerealistic estimates put environmental damage at 8–13 per cent ofChina’s GDP growth each year, which means that China has lostalmost everything it has gained since the late 1970s due topollution.

(Pan 2006)

Ordinary citizens in China nowadays cannot be sure of what is in thefood they consume every day. It has been suggested that athletes at the2008 Beijing Olympics may show drug positive in tests simply becauseof their consumption of antibiotics and hormone-induced food. OneChinese official suggested that all the food to be used for the Olympicsshould be tested on mice first, and the competitors should be asked notto eat outside the Olympic Villages (Li Yang 2006).

It could be argued that environmental problems are less severe inmore developed countries only because these countries have alreadypassed the early stage of modernity. This indeed is a position that theChinese neoliberals take, as discussed in Gao (2004) and elsewhere inthis book. In other words, develop first and clean up later is theanswer. Environmental degradation takes place in other developingcapitalist countries as well. However, what makes the Chinese casedifferent is that state ownership of rivers, mountains, and land is oftentreated as equivalent to no ownership and no responsibility. The whimof a bureaucrat in charge, or a successful bribe to the same effect, canset off a project or an event with tremendous environmental conse-quences. It is little wonder that most of the worst polluted cities in theworld are currently located in China. The water in most of China’slakes and rivers is undrinkable because of pollution. ‘Environmental


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ills annually cause 300,000 deaths and cost $200 billion – equivalent to10 per cent of the gross domestic product – due to loss of work, medicalexpenses and government outlays’ (Kwong 2006).

Some policies result in environmental degradation even when theirostensible goal is the exact opposite. Take the case of Yunnan, where 94per cent of the land area is mountainous, as an example. In 1981, theCCP and the State Council issued a policy document5 known as Sanding or the ‘The three fixed’: fixed mountain rights, fixed forestry rightsand fixed responsibility. The policy was designed to copy the so-calledsuccess of the responsibility system in agriculture by producing a kindof forestry responsibility system. It was assumed that giving indi-vidual households the right to manage sections of forestry wouldensure that the same households would look after the forest in aresponsible fashion. What happened instead was that the locals usedtheir rights to chop down the trees and sell them. Within three years,the once thickly forested mountains were chopped bare. Any forestthat was left was due to the impossibility of access. Now the localshave nothing to rely on for their livelihood and are dependent ongovernment handouts (Zhang Deyuan 2005).

White cat, black cat: the argument of efficiency versus fairness

From the late 1970s until his death, Deng Xiaoping was adamant thatthere should be no debate on whether China was a socialist or capi-talist country, because he believed the debate would pose an obstacleto development. He proposed a deliberate strategy of ambiguity sothat capitalist elements could creep into the system. This pragmaticapproach was ideologically legitimized by the philosophy that‘practicum is the sole criterion of truth’, which was summarized by thepost-Mao Deng-led authorities as one of the essential elements of MaoZedong Thought.6

What was clear to China’s political and intellectual elite policymakers was that the Western style of life and material abundance wasto be desired, and if a way could be found to achieve that goal, it didnot matter what ‘ism’ it took. It does not matter whether the cat iswhite or black so long as it catches mice. This strategy of developmenteventually rendered the debate about the colour of the cat seemingly anon-issue. Since then, even though there has been a split between theso-called New Left and Liberals among the intellectual elite (Gao 2004,Kipnis 2003, Zhang Xudong 2001 and Hu 2004), the dominant voice inChina’s intellectual discourse has been economic rationalism, whichargues that efficiency should take priority over fairness. The under-lying assumption is that if and when efficiency leads to greater wealthin the country, everyone will be better off.


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Seeing the past from the present: a hole in the discursive hegemony

Since the neoliberal guru Milton Friedman’s first visit to China in 1980,there has developed a neoliberal dynasty (Kwong 2006) that has exer-cised what Wang Hui (2004: 9) called a ‘discursive hegemony’ overintellectual discourse for over a quarter of a century. According to theidea of development embodied in this discourse, a generation ofChinese has to be sacrificed, and those who are to be sacrificed are the50 million workers who lost their jobs, plus 800 million peasants (LiYang 2006). One economist, former Dean of the prestigious GuanghuaManagement Institute at Beijing University Li Yining, argues that allwelfare measures should be abolished so as to maintain work enthu-siasm. Another economist thinks that Chinese society can progressonly if the gap between the rich and poor is increased (Li Yang 2006).Only recently, since the leadership changed from Jiang Zemin/ZhuRongji to Hu Jintao/Wen Jiabao, has there been concern that Chinamight be Latin-Americanized (Caoyan Jushi 2005). Dissenting voiceshave now begun to crack a hole in the hegemonic discourse of ‘effi-ciency first and nothing else matters’ (Liu Guoguang 2005 and WangHui 2006).

In summary, the intellectual consensus of ‘development no matterwhat’ has broken down. Now Mao’s legacy has started to be looked ata little more seriously. The past can be viewed positively now becausethe failure of the present is obvious even to some of the political andintellectual elite, such as Professor Liu Guoguang (2005), who used tobe staunch supporters of Deng Xiaoping but now begin to question thecapitalist road that Deng has taken.


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Conclusion: truth and beliefvalues of socialism andChina’s future direction

The image we usually have in the West of contemporary China is thatit is a highly regimented, regulated and strictly controlled society.China is usually interpreted as a dictatorship (either party dictatorshipor personal dictatorship), or a country run by a state of factional poli-tics, or a state of ideological control. Clearly each of these approachesoffers some insight into the mechanism of Chinese politics, but whatactually happens is often the result of the interactions of many factorsthat cannot be explained by a single conceptual model. Much of whathas happened in post-Mao rural China, for instance, is often the resultof unintended policy, and sometimes a result of lack of regulation ormanagement from the state. To interpret what happens at the grass-roots we need to have a much more sophisticated conceptual approachthat involves people’s truth and belief values.

Truth and belief values of a political discourse

We could advance our understanding of what has been happening inChina a step further by suggesting that the power of political discourseat any given time may be too strong for a change at that particular timeuntil and unless the truth and belief values of that discourse arediscredited. A brief outline of the so-called rural reform will illustratethe point. The household responsibility system (baogan zhi) that even-tually led to the collapse of the collective system was not conceptuallyoriginal, nor politically innovative. Before the system was officiallysanctioned all over the country many villagers practised baogan zhi invarious forms in many places on and off in the Mao era. It was offsometimes when agricultural policy was more radical and on at othertimes, depending also on inclinations of local leaders. 1978, two yearsafter the death of Mao and after the arrest of the Maoist radicals theGang of Four, is considered a watershed year of reform as it was thenthat a resolution on rural China was passed by the central committeeof the CCP. But in fact that 1978 resolution explicitly stated that baoganzhi was not allowed (bu xu). In a 1979 central government documentthe word bu xu (not allowed) was changed to bu yao (do not); and onlyin 1980 did a CCP document state that baogan zhi was sanctioned as akind of socialist responsibility system. It was not until the mid-1980s

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that the collective system was finally dismantled. The reason for thisgradual change is that the Maoist legacy of a socialist discourse ofpublic (or collective) ownership was not something that could bethrown out of the window at the desire of any small group or indi-vidual. To establish the belief that privatization of land is legitimatetakes a longer time.

Truth and belief value of exploiting the peasantry

After the death of Ding Zuomin, one of the key figures in the threestories outlined in Chapter 9 that highlighted the miserable life of therural poor, there was a consensus that something had to be done aboutthe tax and levy burden on rural residents. A new agenda of lesseningtax burden on farmers was therefore evolved. But the truth and beliefvalue of the discourse that upheld the need for exploiting the peasantrywas not easy to phase out, again because in the knowledge system ofboth Marxism and anti-Marxist liberalism the truth of and belief inindustrial and urban development at the expense of the peasantry havebeen taken for granted.

On 8 November 1993 a cross-departmental provincial conference washeld in Hehui, the capital city of Anhui, to discuss the issue of rural taxreform. With the support of other speakers, He Kaiyin, policy adviser tothe Anhui provincial government think tank, made a passionate plea forchange. But he was unable to answer a hostile question from the head ofthe Rural Taxation Office of the Provincial Finance Department: ‘who isgoing to pay the salaries of the personnel and government offices allover the province [if local governments were not allowed tax and levythe farmers]?’ Only Premier Zhu Rongji had the answer: the costs wouldhave to be paid by taxing the business, the commerce and urban sectors.But this was not what Zhu wanted to do.

The case of He Kaiyin described in Chen and Chun (2004) alsodemonstrates that policy initiatives in contemporary China come fromdiversified sources, even from government-employed ‘research’ or‘investigative’ personnel (such as He Kaiyin). Even a journalist whowrites an internal report may set an agenda for policy making whichmay take years to fruition. Clearly there is no single locus of power,and power and knowledge interact. That is why the change of truthand belief value is as important as change of a leadership. And that iswhat I mean by political discourse.

Do the values of socialism matter?

It is in this sense that the values of socialism still matter in China. Thefact that Marxism-Leninism is still used to legitimize political


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suppression is a double-edged sword for the Chinese authorities. Anessential part of Marxist-Leninist ideology is the value of socioeco-nomic equality and justice. The disadvantaged in China can and dostill use this value regime to justify their protests and resistance. YuJianrong (2005) points out that the values embedded in state social-ism are still useful for resistance. He notes that urban Chinese work-ers usually appeal to the state for support in their protests againsttheir employers, whereas the targets of rural protests are state agentsof the local governments. In other words both rural and urban resi-dents take central government’s declared socialist values as justifica-tion of their protests, a justification that the Chinese authorities in thename of CCP find difficult to renounce.

Take the case of rural resistance outlined in Chapter 9 as furtherillustration. A kind of organized and rational resistance has beenactive, strong and emerging from very early on, and is very hard forthe state to handle. A resort to simple brutal force does not alwayswork. There are two reasons for this. First, the CCP, of which Mao wasone of the founding fathers and the most dominant leader, is still theruling party and it has not denounced the value of the politicaldiscourse of social and economic justice. Second, the truth and beliefvalues of class struggle, though officially abandoned by the state andby most of the intellectual elite, have not been totally eradicated amongthe people. One of the primary differences between the Stalinist SovietUnion and the Mao era in China is that, unlike Stalin who employedan efficient and iron state machine to crack down on political opposi-tion, Mao always mobilized the masses and let them consume the truthand belief values of class struggle in practice. One of the consequencesof this ‘mass line’ is that the ideas of class struggle have become part ofhuman value, knowledge and truth. In other words, the discourse ofclass struggle legacy from the Mao era has made the farmer and otherordinary Chinese ‘battlers’ aware of their rights and the idea ofequality (He Xuefeng 2007).

Learning from past failures

Once upon a time, the discourse that ‘only socialism can save China’became the truth and belief value for many of the bright and intelligentChinese. Having seen the seemingly abundant material wealth inWestern capitalist countries, most of China’s political and intelligentsiaelite have gradually abandoned this socialist truth and belief value.Hence, the truth and belief values of market capitalism discourse havebecome dominant, as the Chinese political and intelligentsia elite hastaken Deng’s ‘Let some get rich first’ and ‘Development is the corevalue’ as guiding principles for government decision making. The

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underlying assumption of this development strategy is that sincesocialism cannot make China wealthy and powerful, China needs tolearn from capitalism (Xu Jiatun 1992). The policies and practice ofspecial economic zones to attract foreign capital and to exploit cheaprural labour have been premised on this idea of a catch-up lesson ofcapitalism.

The socialist truth and belief value of land ownership

The truth and belief values of using capitalist means to achievewealth and prosperity have been widely accepted in China now. Butthe truth and belief values of socialism have not been completelyabandoned, as least regarding land ownership. The tension betweenthe two truth and value regimes can be seen in the Chinese Constitu-tion. The 1993 Amendment to the 1982 Chinese Constitution adds aclause stating that ‘China is at the primary stage of socialism’ andcommitting the country to ‘building socialism with Chinese charac-teristics’. The 1999 Amendments further add that: ‘China will stay atprimary stage of socialism for a long period of time.’ This is a crucialmodification to allow the development of the private sector and tojustify China’s opening up to Western capitalist influence. In otherwords, at a primary stage of socialism it is necessary and legitimateto adopt capitalist or non-socialist elements in the system.

However, the truth and belief values of socialist ownership of landare still powerful. This can be seen in the aborted land ownershipreform experiment suggested by He Kaiyin. The basic ideas of He’splan had two elements: one was that, though the state should own theland, the villagers should be given permanent ownership of the landuse rights. Furthermore, ownership of land use rights can be trans-ferred and can be inherited. The other leg of the reform plan was thatthe villagers would only have to pay the state one tax a year as rent,and that tax should be fixed for several years. All and any other taxesor levies should be rendered illegal. He’s plan aimed not only to solvethe tax burden problem but also the land ownership issue once and forall. His ideas were persuasive enough for the authorities to entertainthe idea of an experiment.

Though there was informal support from the then Premier Li Peng,actual ground support from the provincial government, and evensupport from the party secretary and governor of the county where theexperiment was to take place, the opposition from the chairman of thecounty’s People’s Congress, widely known as a powerless rubberstamp institution in China, was enough to shelve He’s plan (Chen andChun 2004). For the opposition to say that the reform plan violates thelaw regarding land ownership was enough to silence not only He and


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his reform team but also the party secretary and the governor of thecounty. He Kaiyin then tried to persuade the leadership of three othercounties to implement his reform plan and the party secretaries of thethree counties supported him; but again the plan was aborted in eachof the three counties because of opposition from their People’sCongresses.

The People’s Congress was traditionally just a rubber stamp in thepast because it was logically meant to be like that. The CCP wassupposed to work for the people and the People’s Congress wassupposed to support the CCP for that reason. The governing logic istherefore that in a socialist country there should not be major andprincipled contradictions between the CCP and the People’sCongress. However, as the post-Mao reform extended its boundaries,the CCP started to take the lead in advancing capitalist interests thatcan be contradictory to the interest of the ordinary people. Logically,then, the People’s Congresses are no longer obliged to support theCCP all the time and they do not, as the defeat of the He proposalshows. Though development by using capitalist means has beenaccepted as a strategy, some of the truth and belief values and beliefsof socialism still remain. One key truth in this knowledge system isthe public ownership of land in a socialist country. By claiming touphold this key truth the People’s Congress claims the right to blockthe programme of land privatization, even though the CCP leaderssupported the programme.

In any case, the CCP finds the collective ownership of land in ruralChina works well for its march towards capitalism. To start with, thecollective ownership of land gives the CCP some socialist legitimacyin theory. In practice, collective ownership of land provides a dump-ing ground from which an abundant source of cheap migrant labourfor urban manufacturing industry is tapped. And it is cost-free for thestate. In cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, there are fewghettos that offend one’s sense of decency, as found in many devel-oping countries. Even though there are an estimated 100 millionmigrant workers all over China at any given time, one does not seechildren rummaging through rubbish dumps. The key to China’ssuccess in avoiding ghettos lies the existing land ownership system.Every rural Chinese migrant worker has a family with some land thatthey can resort to for basic survival. When migrant workers areunable to find work, or grow too old to work in a sweatshop, theymay return to their native villages where a piece of land is nominallytheirs to use. It is for this reason that the migrant workers are able toleave their children at home in their native villages. What thePeople’s Congresses of the three counties wanted to preserve was thelast refuge for the rural poor.

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The socialist truth and belief value of labour law

In the absence of an established legal system to protect individualrights, the socialist legacy of the Mao era matters a lot even now. It isoften claimed that trade unions in the Mao era were not only decora-tive but actually another organ protecting the interest of the state. Thisline of thinking is based on the assumption that the relationshipbetween trade unions and the state ought to be antagonistic in acommunist state. This anti-communist cold war assumption fails tonotice that the mode of production in the Mao era was so structuredthat the social relationship between the workers and the state was notmeant to be antagonistic. There might be disputes and grievances inindividual cases, in which case trade unions might act on behalf of theworkers, but in general workers and management were supposed towork together for the same goal; workers were supposed to be ownersand masters of the means of production and therefore supervise andparticipate in management. It was precisely in order to strengthen thissupposed social relationship that the Cultural Revolution waslaunched. It was for this reason that workers and masses were encour-aged to participate in the ‘Four Big Freedoms’ (Da ming, da fang, dabianlun, da zibao – speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding greatdebates and writing big character posters) during the Cultural Revolu-tion. It was for this reason that the Four Big Freedoms were writteninto the Chinese Constitution in the Mao era.

When the mode of production is transformed, that is, when themeans of production are no longer publicly owned and when workersare no longer supposed to be the owners of these properties, the rela-tionship between the trade unions and the state then becomeantagonistic. Deng saw clearly what the problems would be. So in 1980he ordered the abolition of the Four Big Freedoms. In 1982 when theChinese Constitution was amended, the clause of the Four Big Free-doms, together with the freedom to strike, was stricken out (Hu 2004).

Clearly the post-Mao regime has started to axe the Maoist legacylittle by little, but there is still substantial amount that remains intact.As has been discussed, collective ownership of land remains intact.Another part of the Maoist legacy that remains intact is related tolabour conditions and regulations in state-owned enterprises. Thetruth and belief values of socialism mean that workers have the rightto rest at least one day a week, the right to legal holidays, the right notto work overtime more than three hours a day or 36 hours a week intotal, the right to be paid overtime rates not lower than 150 per cent ofthe normal rate for a working day or 200 per cent during holidays, theright to be paid on time, the right to maternity leave of no less than 90days and healthy and safe work equipment. However, in private and


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foreign owned enterprises, these labour regulations do not apply (DuGuang 2005). Though the freedom to strike has been abolished, the‘capitalist roaders’ have yet to wipe out the labour legacy of the Maoera in state-owned enterprises.

Mining accidents offer another example of how socialist values stillmatter. According to one estimate, there were more than 4,000 deathsfrom mining accidents in 2004 alone (He Qinglian 2005). Another esti-mate puts this figure at 6,000 (Armitage 2005). According to oneestimate, the coal mining accident death toll is as high as 30,000 a yearin China (French 2007). Li Qiang (2005), the head of a labour-watchorganization based in New York, maintains that China only produces35 per cent of the world’s coal but suffers 80 per cent of the world’smining accident deaths, with the death rate 30 times higher than thatof South Africa and 100 times higher than that of the United States.

But these accidents happen mostly in private mining firms. Thesituation in private mining is that those with capital can force minersto sign contracts that stipulate that compensation for death should notexceed 20,000 RMB. A miners’ life has thus been made so cheap thatbusiness contractors are not interested in investing in safety. Whilemedia publicity eventually resulted in an increase in the price of a lifeto 200,000 RMB in some mining areas, local government authoritieswould prefer to cover up accidents and not to collect death figures. Tomake life easier for private contractors some local governments simplyreport a dead person as missing (Chen Bisheng 2005).

Again, thanks to the socialist legacy of the Mao era, this kind ofviolation not just of human rights but of human life does not prevail ina state-owned coal mine.

The socialist truth and belief values of healthcare and education

State-owned enterprises are among the few institutions that upholdsocialist values through their labour regulations. Other importantsocialist legacies from the era of Mao such as healthcare and educationin rural China have been cut back so much by Deng and neoliberalpolicy makers that it will be difficult for them to recover. In 2003, thenew CCP central leadership in Beijing decided to allocate some stateexpenditure to rural China, something that had not been done since thelate 1970s. A document to this effect was sent to various state depart-ments, but these departments refused to endorse it. Consequently,when a meeting was convened to finalize the document, a meeting thatwas to be attended by all the relevant ministries, no documentationwas tabled for the agenda. Hu Jintao, furious at this deliberate sabo-tage, declared at a Politburo meeting that with or without

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documentation it was his decision that the policy had to be imple-mented. Six months later, an inspection team that he sent out revealedthat no new funding had been allocated to rural areas (Wen 2005).

During the SARS epidemic the Minister of Health was sacked and apolicy of investing more in rural China was declared. To implementthis new policy ‘the iron lady’, Vice-Premier Wu Yi, was assigned to actas health minister. Five billion RMB was allocated to implementpreventive health measures in rural China. However, all of that moneywas eventually used in county and urban centres instead. It turned outthat rural health clinics and facilities had all been privatized. TheMinistry of Health, under Wu Yi, had no idea of how to allocatefunding from the central government to private health businesses inrural China. The CCP central government is one of the few, if not prob-ably the only government, in the world that has money to allocate butdoes not know how to do it. According to Wen Tiejun (2005), in 2003the central government had money that was left unused and the statebanks had 600 billion RMB that could not be loaned out.

The battle of China’s history

The appraisal of post-Mao reforms in this book is not meant to arguethat the past is better than the present or that there is nothing goodabout the post-Mao reforms. For many people in China the presentregime is less oppressive and suppressive. Even the label of landlordand rich peasants as a class classification was abolished in 1978, aninitiative that I consider the best ever by the post-Mao Hua Guofengleadership. It is also absolutely indisputable that there is no longer anyshortage of consumer goods, and that the people in China as a wholehave more material possessions. The Chinese as a whole have moremoney, they have more to eat, they have more and better clothes towear, and many of them even travel more for pleasure.

It is therefore very puzzling that through all my travel and workin rural China – including a trip to Long Bow Village, a village thathas been extensively documented by Hinton, and especially my in-depth study in the Gao Village area – I have heard expressions ofadmiration and even love of Mao everywhere, but hardly anyenthusiasm for Deng. I have encountered only a couple of peoplewho preferred Deng to Mao and these were descendants of former‘class enemies’ such as landlords or rich peasants. They attributedtheir liberation from class labelling to Deng Xiaoping, although infact the abolition of class labels was accomplished in 1978 beforeDeng became the paramount leader. Mao’s portraits can still be seenin the average rural household, but one can hardly find a portrait ofDeng Xiaoping anywhere. During my interviews I found that even


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those who did make it by getting rich first in rural China preferredMao as a leader, and they refer to Deng derogatively as ‘Deng aizi’(Deng the dwarf).

That rural people prefer Mao to Deng is not because they arebenighted, brainwashed or plain stupid as suggested by some Chineseelite intelligentsia. On the contrary, they are able to compare the era ofMao with that of post-Mao reforms in a broad picture. For them Maowas the foremost leader that led the country to unity and stability. Itwas during the era of Mao that a basic and fundamental industrial,agricultural and scientific foundation was laid for later development.Yes, everyone had a hard life, but it was no harder than before 1949.More importantly, they understand that they had to tighten their beltsnot because they were exploited for the benefit of Mao, his families orany Chinese individuals who were in leadership positions. In theirunderstanding everything, including mistakes and disasters like theGreat Leap Forward, was meant to build a better society for everyone.They find that they cannot apply the same interpretation to the policiesand intentions of the post-Mao reform leadership. They think the post-Mao authorities are simply reaping the fruit of the hard work done inthe past, and for their own personal benefit.

My research in the Gao Village area in the past two decades andmy recent research in Long Bow Village suggest that many ruralpeople think that even if China had retained its collective system theywould have had the same kind of living standard as they have now.Wang Jinhong, who served as the Party Secretary of Long BowVillage from 1966 to 2003, had no doubt this when I interviewed himin February 2005. He had built a huge and comfortable two-storyhouse during the 1980s, but he insisted that he would have done thesame if Maoist policies had continued.

According to one research study in Henan province, some ruralpeople actually think they could have done even better, and foreveryone. The survey was carried out in a county that had aboveaverage living standards at the time of research in 2000. Among the 200questionnaires returned (out of 208), only 11 per cent agreed that livingstandards had gone up a lot since the reforms. In contrast, 55 per centof the respondents thought that their standards of living had not goneup much, 11.5 per cent felt they had not risen at all, and 22.5 per centstated that they were worse off since the reforms (Zhuo Yi 2003). Simi-larly, 41.5 per cent of them stated both that their living standard wouldhave been more or less the same and the societal habits and customs(shehui fenqi) would have been much better if Maoist policies hadcontinued. About 90 per cent of the respondents thought that in termsof healthcare, agricultural mechanization, irrigation improvement andtechnical innovation, reform policies have made the situation worse.

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The fact that rural Chinese did not possess this or that consumergood in the past was not the fault of Mao, they would argue. The factthat they do have them now is not to Deng’s credit either, they wouldsay. Some of these consumer goods were not even invented then. Thefact that grain yields are higher now than those during the era of Maowas not because they had no incentive to work hard then, as suggestedby economic rationalists. The land yields more now because chemicalsare used more extensively and intensively.

China’s future direction

How is China likely to develop in the future? No revolution is visible onthe horizon. Resistance and isolated insurrections do, and will continueto, take place, but collective actions that will overthrow the currentregime are unlikely. The more extensive and intensive use of chemicalsis set to continue. China as the world assembly factory will continue toproduce cheap commodities for the world’s rich. More and more ofChina’s industries and enterprises will be taken over by internationalcapital. While China has become entrenched in the global capitalistsystem the plunder of natural resources, the thirst for raw materials andenvironmental abuse will worsen. In this scenario China’s future maywell be the future of global environmental catastrophe. This is one likelydevelopment.

The second scenario is that scientific and technological inventionswill come quickly enough to phase out the existing production tech-nology so that environmental deterioration can be halted. Some wouldargue that the replacement technology is already there. But theproblem is how to get human beings all over the world to act togetherquickly enough when our national and international policies areguided by not only the evolutionary instinct for survival of the fittest,but also the animal desire for instant satisfaction here and now. Thissecond scenario is possible, but its likelihood depends on our efforts.

The dialectics of human competition rationalized by economicrationalism may in fact lead to disastrous military conflicts betweenChina and the rest of the world over limited resources, or spheres ofinfluence and control. This worst scenario is not unlikely, and certainlynot impossible, especially if China is not ready to submit to Westerndominance.

The fourth scenario is that Mr Democracy comes along to take overChina. For many of the Chinese elite intelligentsia of the Enlighten-ment tradition, once China becomes democratized the Chinese peoplewill live happily ever after. Leaving aside the issue of whether democ-racy one way or another will provide solutions to the contemporaryproblems in China that require urgent solutions, it is far from clear how


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to make democracy come about. The Iraqi situation has demonstratedthat imposition from outside does not work to anyone’s benefit. Themost sensible approach is therefore to induce internal changes in Chinaso that more accountable and more responsible governance andgovernment can take root.

The idea of taking root has a metaphorical implication here. Forsomething to take root it needs to adjust to the environment and to takein whatever nutrients are available. The Chinese 1949 revolution andMaoist legacy have become part of the Chinese environment andcannot simply be discarded. Therefore the most fruitful approach is toabsorb what is already there, including China’s long tradition as wellas its recent socialist heritage. Many lessons can be drawn from theseheritages. Negative lessons can be drawn from the Mao era, so thatviolence should be avoided as much as possible and measures shouldbe taken before violence erupts. Positive lessons – such as populardemocracy; grassroots participation in management and production;and cheap and locally adopted and traditionally proved healthcareand education – can also be drawn from the Mao era. The ideas andpractices of Chinese socialist democracy should be made use of. It isalong these lines that we should imagine an alternative model of devel-opment in China. Modernity does not have to be totally Western eitherin terms of governance or in terms of production organization andtechnology.

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Notes

Chapter 1

This chapter is an extended and revised version of a paper thatappeared in Critical Asian Studies, 34: 4 (2002), pp. 419–34. Substantialdiscussion of the debate about the Cultural Revolution in Tibet isadded. I take this opportunity to thank Critical Asian Studies for thepermission to re-work the paper.

1. Khrushchev’s total denunciation of Stalin the man not only set backthe cause of Communism all over the world but also made him looktreacherous and hypocritical, for he had fanatically supported theregime when Stalin was alive. Learning from Khrushchev’s historicallesson, the CCP resolution does not denounce Mao utterly, and moreimportantly, does not denounce Mao the man. Instead, the resolutionin fact says that Mao deviated from Mao. This apparent logicalabsurdity is, by any standard, politically and philosophically a strokeof genius.

2. Pinyin transliteration of the author’s name in Chinese characters; hername in English spelling is Woeser.

Chapter 2

This chapter is based on a paper presented at the ‘Is a history of theCultural Revolution possible’ workshop with Professor Allan Badiou,Washington University, Seattle, 22 to 26 January 2006. The first versionof the paper was presented at the Chinese Studies Association ofAustralia Biennial Conference, 9–12 July 2003, Sydney. I take theopportunity here to thank Tani Balow and Wang Hui for the invitationto Seattle. I thank Peter Zarrow and John Fitzgerald for the panel inSydney, and Wang Hui, Feng Chongyi, Anne-Marie Brady and WuYiching for comments.

1. For representatives of this genre see The Wound (Shanghen, 伤痕) by LuXinhua, Mimosa (Ling yu rou, 灵与肉) by Zhang Xianliang, TheSnowstorm Tonight (Jinye you baofengxue, 今夜有暴风雪) by LiangXiaosheng, Bloody Dusk (Xuese huanghun, 血色黄昏) by Lao Gui , andFrozen River of the North (Damo binghe, 大漠冰河) by Zhang Kangkang.For the review of the wounded see Barmé and Lee 1979, Link 1983a,1983b and 1984.

2. In 2003 the year when Li Shenzhi died a conference in Sydney,‘当代中国思潮研究：李慎之与自由主义在中国的命运’, was organizedby Feng Chongyi from which a collection of papers were published inChinese as《中国自由主义论丛》.

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3. The poem can be found, among others, at http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/4/5/11/ n536305.htm.

4. The Chinese term for ‘Two whateverism’ is Liang ge fanshi. It is derivedfrom one of Mao’s out of context quotes that ‘whatever is opposed byour enemy we should support and whatever is supported by ourenemy we should oppose’. In the early 1980s the term fanshipai (what-everists) was used by Deng Xiaoping and his followers, who accusedthe then CCP leader Hua Guofeng of being a Two whateverist: what-ever Mao said must be followed and whatever Mao did must becorrect. The information on whateverism presented here also appearsin my writing on Chinese electronic media and Chinese dissidentselsewhere.

5. Some of the material about the Two whatevers presented here is alsoused in Mobo Gao (2004–2006).

6. Chai Ling, after finishing a Princeton MPA and a Harvard MBA runs asoftware company, Jenzabar.com, in Massachusetts (Harrison 2003).On her business web page she uses the claim of being nominated twicefor Nobel Prize to advertise Dongfang ribao. Chai Ling states that we allwant the American dream, the movies of the West and success. Li Luruns Himalaya Capital Partners L.P hedge fund (Buruma 2003).

7. Thanks for donation from Taiwan and to the Taiwan Labour Net whoprovides a free service the http://www.zggr.org reopened in 2006.

Chapter 3

1. Nancy Hearst and Tony Saich (1997) in their ‘Newly Available Sourceson the CCP History of the People’s Republic of China’, list memoirs byChen Zaidao, Cheng Zihua, Geng Biao, He Changgong, Kang Keqing,Kong Congzhou, Li Zhimin, Liao Hansheng, Liu Zhen, Lu Zhengcao,Luo Ronghuan, Qin Jiwei, Song Renqiong, Su Yu, Wang Ping, WangShoudao, Xiao Jingguang, Xu Shiyou, Yang Chengwu, Yang Dezhi, YeFei, Zeng Sheng, Zhang Zongsun, Liu Xiao, Li Rui, BoYibo and NieRongzhen. They also list the publication of diaries by Luo Zhanglong,Yun Daiying and Chen Geng.

2. Other memoirs, biographies and autobiographies include those by TieZhuwei (1986), Peng Cheng (1989), Lin Qingshan (1988a, 1988b, and1988c), Mu Xin (1997), Zhang Yunsheng (1988), Yu Gong (1988), ChenHua (1992), Ren Jian (1989), Ma Luo et al (1993), Qing Ye and Fang Lei(1993), Wen Feng (1993), Shen Danying (1992), Jiao Ye (1993), andGuan Weixun (1993).

3. In fact the first author of this co-authored book was Yan’s wife GaoGao. The revised English version of this book published by HawaiiUniversity Press is much improved in terms of scholarship.

4. Hu Qiaomu died in 1992. The book was written on the basis of morethan 20 talks that Hu had with a group of writers sanctioned by theCCP authorities.

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5. Lao Gui’s book is translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, andpublished by Viking in 1995 under the name of Ma Bo.

6. Dong Bian was married to Tian Jiaying, Mao’s personal secretary, whocommitted suicide at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

Dian Dian is Luo Ruiqing’s daughter. Luo was the Minister of Secu-rity and Chief of Staff of the PLA before the Cultural Revolution. Luowas one of the first to fall as the Cultural Revolution unfolded, and triedto kill himself by jumping from a building. He survived but was perma-nently crippled. Luo was released from jail in 1973 and was put in chargeof the administrative work of the Central Military Committee of the CCPin 1977. In July 1978 he was admitted to a West German hospital fortreatment of his crippled legs. Though the operation was successful, Luodied in the hospital of a heart attack in August of 1978.

Zhang is the second wife of Qiao Guanhua, who was one of themost talented diplomats of the PRC. Appointed personally by Mao,Qiao led the first PRC delegation to the United Nations in 1971. Soonafter, he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, a position thatproved to be the beginning of his downfall. He was accused of beinginvolved with the Gang of Four and disappeared from the politicalscene after 1976. Qiao died in 1983. Zhang Hanzhi herself was apersonality of note. Her father Zhang Shizhao was Mao’s long-termpersonal friend and Zhang Hanzhi used to be Mao’s English teacher.

Liu Siqi was one of Mao’s daughters-in-law.Wang Guangmei is Liu Shaoqi’s wife and Wang Guangying is Liu’s

brother-in-law. Liu Pingping and Li Yuan are Liu Shaoqi’s children.7. Zhu Min includes Zeng Zhi, wife of Tao Zhu, Tao Siliang, daughter of

Tao Zhu, Liu Pingping, Liu Yuan and Liu Tingting (another child ofLiu Shaoqi), Deng Maomao (daughter of Deng Xiaoping), PengMeikui (niece of Peng Dehuai), Xue Ming (wife of He Long who wasone of the ten marshals), Dian Dian, and Tao Xiaoyong (son of TaoYong who was the Commander of the Chinese South Sea Fleet beforethe Cultural Revolution, but died in suspicious circumstances duringthe Cultural Revolution).

8. Zhang Hanzhi was said to be a friend of Jiang Qing, who was said tohave influenced the marriage between her and Qiao Guanhua.

9. Only some figures were allowed to be interviewed. They include YaoDengshan (who was blamed for the burning of the British Embassy in1967), Wang Li, Guan Feng (two radicals during the Cultural Revolu-tion who were blamed for advocating struggle against the militaryestablishment), Lin Liheng (Lin Biao’s daughter) and Ji Dengkui(personally promoted by Mao and one of the Vice-Premiers during theCultural Revolution) and Chen Boda. One can well imagine that thesepeople would have been very careful of what they were allowed to sayduring the interviews. One member of the so-called Gang of Four YaoWenyuan wrote his memoirs but was not allowed to publish them(Boxun.com 2007).


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10. Wang Dongxing was allowed to publish a book in the form of diaries.However, the diaries were limited to certain ‘safe dates and safecontents’. The diaries only cover the dates from March 1947 to March1948, from December 1949 to March 1950 and Mao’s visit to the oldguerrilla base Jinggangshan from 21 May to 30 May 1965. The latestbook by Wang Dongxing (2004) is equally without contents.

A book about Chen by Qin Huailu had to be smuggled out of Chinato be published.

11. Yu Huiyong was arrested in 1976 and committed suicide in 1977 (Dao1994).

Shangshan xiaxiang refers to a campaign of sending millions ofurban educated youth to the rural and mountainous areas in China.For an analysis of the events surrounding Li Qinglin see Gao (1999b).

12. It is also a way to make money. Both Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zeminhad collected works published by the government in tens of millionsof copies. Every CCP and government organ was then ordered topurchase them to study. The so-called gao fei (author’s remuneration)in millions went to their families. This, of course, was following aprecedent. Mao had his collected works published by the governmentand everyone was obliged to study, if not to purchase them. Mao alsocollected gai fei. In recent years the anti-Maoists have been having afield day on this issue. While choosing to ignore the fact that the Dengand Jiang families manage to enrich themselves from these collectedworks, they vilify Mao as a hypocrite who advocated serving thepeople while collecting gao fei of tens of millions. However one wantsto interpret the issue, two points are clear. First, Mao’s family did notenrich themselves from Mao’s gao fei then and his descendents havenot enriched themselves by possessing the gao fei now. Second, Maoreally had something interesting and original to say in his collectedworks, whereas Deng and Jiang do not.

13. Authors such as Li Rui, Wang Nianyi and Jin Chunming are, however,more theoretically orientated.

14. When I visited Wang at his home in Beijing in 1992, the first thing hesaid to me with great indignation was that Mao slept with manywomen and sexual hormones were used to stimulate his sexual drive.

15. As early as the later 1970s, there was a rumour running around inChina that Zhang Yufeng claimed that Mao was her son’s father andthat she wanted her son to receive part of Mao’s inheritance. Li Zhisui,however, claims that by the time Mao met Zhang Yufeng he wassterile.

16. Positive evidence and arguments about the Red Guards, and espe-cially the Rebels, such as Zhou Ziren (2006), can be published only inareas outside the political control of China.

17. Wu Zetian (AD 627–705) has become symbolic of an evil woman inChinese history written by Confucian scholars.

18. Views and evidence that argue positively for Lin Biao, such as Wu

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Faxian (2006), appear occasionally on the e-media and in writings thatappear in areas outside the political control of China.

19. Though the Women’s Federation leadership was under attack during theCultural Revolution, as all bureaucratic institutions were, genuine effortswere made to promote women’s status. Those efforts and the success theyproduced can be confirmed by numerous documents and statistics. Oneof the examples cited in this chapter is the partial list of ordinary womenwho were promoted to positions in the central leadership.

20. For a reappraisal of China’s economic performance during the Maoperiod and the Cultural Revolution see Bramall (1993), Endicott (1989)and Law (2003).

Chapter 5

1. One mu is about 0.0667 hectare and one jin is half a kilogramme.2. Marc Gellman and Tom Hartman (2002), in their piece published in the

widely circulated Reader’s Digest, are more inventive. They not onlyplace Mao alongside Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, but with Osama binLaden as well.

Chapter 6

1. By Chinese I mean those who were born and brought up in Chinabefore and during the Cultural Revolution but now may live either inChina or abroad. Writers residing in Hong Kong and Taiwan may alsobe included in this category.

2. The questionable claims and discrepancies that have been raised byTeiwes are not discussed in this chapter.

3. One mu of land equals 0.0667 hectare.4. For those who are not familiar with Chinese history it should be noted

that the 460 so-called scholars who were reportedly executed were notkilled because they were Confucian scholars but because they wereconsidered to have cheated Qin Shihuang in the matter of finding theelixir of life and then have spread rumours against him.

Chapter 7

1. According to Latham (2007), SMS is the most widely used e-mediumin China and has created an unprecedented ‘public sphere’. In the 2007Xiamen demonstration against the government approval a massivenew paraxylene chemical plant, for instance, MSNs and QQs playedan important role. On 1 June 2007, residents were invited though MSNand QQ by friends and family members to go for a ‘walk’ with ayellow band on one arm to a particular place at some particular time.That was how the demonstration was organized (Xie 2007, Cody2007).


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2. For instance on 6 August 1956 the Ministry of Health issued guidelinesfor contraception; on 5 March 1957 the People’s Daily published aneditorial advocating population control; on 18 December 1962 the CCPCentral Committee and the State Council jointly issued instructionsfor the relevant authorities to take serious measures to control popula-tion. In 1964 the State Council set up what was called the PopulationControl Commission. From 1962 to 1964 all the provincial and munic-ipality governments established their own population control offices(http://www.wyzxsx.com/Article/Class14/200708/23342.html,accessed on 31 August 2007).

3. The poetic beauty of the punchy headline is more obvious for thosewho can read Chinese: 错批一人, 误增三亿.

4. According to Huang Yunsheng (2007), Li’s claim was eagerly receivedboth in and outside China. Li Rui made this claim in his paper ‘Ruhekandai Mao Zedong’ (How to regard Mao Zedong), which was read atHarvard University in November 2003, and appears as the firstchapter of a book published in 2005 in Hong Kong titled Li Rui on MaoZedong. In 2006 Li Rui made the same claim to a German journalist.

5. Zhang Qian was Chen Yi’s wife.6. Zhang Wentian was one of the important CCP leaders accused of

being a member of the so-called Peng Dehuai anti-party clique.7. Thanks to Wang Shaoguang who posted this source to me.8. Wei Yan is a character in the historical novel Romance of Three King-

doms. He is often cited as an example of people who are not loyal totheir superiors.

9. Feng was first a warlord and then a Nationalist army general whooften changed sides in alliances.

10. Wang Li was Mao’s theoretical secretary during the Cultural Revolu-tion and drafted many influential theoretical articles and CCP policydocuments. It was Wang who articulated Mao’s idea of ‘continuousrevolution’. From 1964 until 1967 Wang was allowed to attend all theimportant meetings held by the Standing Committee of the Politburoof the CCP, where many of the important decisions were made. Hewas a leading member of the Cultural Revolution Group and duringlate 1966 and early 1967 had almost daily contacts with Mao.

11. Ji Xianlin is a prominent professor at Beijing University and Ba Jin wasa prominent novelist.

12. Liu Yuan is a son of Liu Shaoqi and Bo Xicheng is a son of Bo Yibo.

Chapter 8

1. For instance in Wanwei tianxia luntan, http://www4.bbsland.com/forums/ politics/ messages/5137.html.

2. During the cold war, most Western countries refused to recognize theexistence of the PRC and imposed economic sanctions against China.Though China received technical support from the Soviet Union

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(which was very helpful) during the 1950s, China fell out with theSoviet Union toward the end of that decade and the Soviet Unionwithdrew its support. In contrast, economies in the East Asian regionbelonging to the capitalist camp got a lifeline of support from theUnited States during the cold war. For instance, in return for allowingthe deployment of US forces in Vietnam, South Korea received approx-imately $1 billion dollars from the United States from 1965–70. TheVietnam War absorbed 94 per cent of Korea’s total steel exports and 52per cent of its exports of transportation equipment (Hanley andMendoza 2007). Japan received similar treatment. American ‘specialprocurements’ of war materials from Japan accounted for 60 per centof Japan’s steel exports during the Korean War, and for 10–20 per centduring the Vietnam War (Eiji 2007).

3. By presenting the figures laid out here by Jiang I do not mean to saythat I agree with them. Jiang, like most e-media debate participants,does not cite sources of the data and does not make references. There-fore it is difficult to check or even to engage with this kind of argumentin the normal sense of scholarship. However, this does not diminishthe significance of this kind of debate. One reason is that this kind ofnarrative is likely to be read more widely than a well-researchedacademic paper and therefore has a greater impact. Second, as arguedthroughout this book, human behaviour is guided by perceptions andbeliefs more than ‘the truth’. Just as many a Westerner will bepersuaded by the claims made by Chang and Halliday in The UnknownStory, many Chinese will be persuaded by Jiang.

4. For the importance of the different arrangements in terms of productionorganization see Chapter 5.

5. Qi was one of the Cultural Revolution radicals and a close associate ofJiang Qing.

6. Mao was a friend of Zhu Zhongli’s father. When Zhu arrived in Yan’anit was Mao who introduced her to Wang Jiaxiang, who subsequentlymarried Zhu.

7. Hao is an author of two revolutionary novels about rural China Yanyang tian (The Bright Sunny Sky) and Jin guang dadao (Golden BrightPath).

8. Yang Guang quotes a doggerel: 上学把家长逼疯，卖房把家底掏空，治病不如提前送终 (the cost of sending children to school makesparents crazy, buying a house costs a family everything, and it is betterto prepare a funeral than to be treated for an illness).

9. In July 2007, following the revelation of slave labour in brick kilns inShanxi province and shortly before the important 17th CCP nationalcongress was to take place, 17 veteran CCP party members who usedto hold official positions at ministerial level or above published anopen letter calling for a change of course in China along the lines ofgenuine Marxism and ideas of Mao. The letter explicitly warns thatthere is a danger of ‘Yeltin-like leaders’ appearing within the CCP (Ma


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Bing et al 2007). The letter was quickly circulated on many websites,but the Mao Flag website www.maoflag.net, which first published theletter, was quickly closed down by the Chinese authorities (Magnier2007). Some other websites that published the letter were also blockedfrom access.

Chapter 9

1. According to another estimate, the average urban manufacturingworker’s pay in 2005 in China was 60 US cents an hour, which wasconsiderably higher than the average migrant worker’s earnings. Butcompare that with $2.46 an hour in Mexico (McClenahen 2006).

2. Another interesting development is that many e-media chatroomcontributors call for the establishment of Chinese farmers’ associationsto protect farmers’ interests, and one even suggested that Chen shouldbe the chairman of such an association. See ‘Zhongguo nongmindiaocha zuozhe jishu zhong renwu xinlang lia tian shilu’ (A chat showwith the authors at sina), http://finance.sina.come.cn/roll/20040211/1632626835.shtml, accessed on 4 February 2004.

Chapter 10

1. According to Guo (2007) the poverty line in China was 206 RMB perperson in 1985, 530 in 1995, and 668 in 2004 in Henan.

2. For a more detailed summary of which foreign companies have takenover which local Chinese companies in all industries see a documentwritten by Gao Liang, a research fellow at the Research Centre ofChinese National Assets of the Institute of Structure Reform of theChinese National Development and Reform Commission. The docu-ment was circulated through e-mails in July 2007.

3. According to Chung, among the top ten countries or regions investingin China in 2005, one was Hong Kong and another was the BritishVirgin Islands, a group of islands in the Caribbean with a populationof only 22,000 but at least 400,000 registered companies (Chung 2007).

4. The new labour contract law was eventually passed by the StandingCommittee of the National People’s Congress in 2007. The lawrequires employers to provide written contracts to their workers,restricts the use of temporary labourers and makes it harder to lay offemployees, but some provisions that foreign companies said wouldhurt China’s competitiveness were softened. It remains to be seen howeffectively the law can be enforced, especially for migrant workersfrom rural areas. The media exposure of the widespread slave labourin brick kilns and coal mines may have helped the passage of the law.

5. The Chinese title of the document is Guanyu baohu senlin fazhan linyeluogan wenti de jueding (A resolution on several issues on the protectionof forests and forestry development).

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6. The other essential elements of Mao Zedong Thought are supposedlyto include the mass line and the strategy of the united front. Duringthe early years of the Chinese communist revolution, Mao and hisfollowers were branded as empiricists who had no understanding ofMarxist theory. Mao’s tactic to fight these so-called jiaotiao zhuyizhe(dogmatists) was to argue that what was right and wrong was decidednot by what was said in the canon but by revolutionary practice.


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Glossary of Chinese terms andnames

Pinyin Chinese EnglishCharacter

Ai Siqi 艾思奇 A leading Chinese Marxistphilosopher

baogan zhi 包干制 Household responsibility system

baojian yisheng 保健医生 Health maintenance doctor

Bo Yibo 薄一波 A well-known CCP official whoheld important economic andfinancial positions

Boyang 波阳 Name of a county

caizi jiaren 才子佳人 The brainy and the beautiful

Cao Jingqing 曹景清 A leading Chinese writer onrural China

Chai Ling 柴玲 One of the 1989 Tiananmenprotest student leaders

Chen Ada 陈阿大 A person of humble familybackground promoted toprominent official positionduring the Cultural Revolution

Chen Boda 陈伯达 An important CCP leader duringthe Cultural Revolution

Chen Guidi 陈桂棣 Author of a well-known book onrural China

Chen Yi 陈毅 Chinese Minister of ForeignAffairs before the CulturalRevolution

Chen Yonggui 陈永贵 A well-known CCP official offarming background promotedby Mao

Chen Yun 陈云 One of the very fewideologically consistent top CCPleaders

Chun Tao 春桃 Co-author of a major book onrural China

chun wan 春晚 Annual Spring Festival eveningperformance

cu shengchan 促生产 To promote production

cuo pi yi ren wu 错批一人 Wrong criticism of one

zeng san yi 误增三亿 person led to the mistakenincrease of 300 million people

daotai 道台 Official title in traditional China

Deng Maomao 邓毛毛 Deng Xiaoping’s daughter

Deng Pufang 邓朴方 Deng Xiaoping’s son

Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 Considered to be the architect ofthe post-Mao reform

Deng Zihui 邓子恢 A noted CCP leader in charge ofagriculture during the early Maoera

Dian Dian 点点 Daughter of Luo Ruiqing

Diaoyutai 钓鱼台 Part of the CCP leadershipheadquarters in Beijing

diwang jiangxiang 帝王将相 Emperors/kings, primeministers and generals

Dong Bian 董边 Wife of Tian Jiaying

Dongguan 东莞 Name of a city

duowei 多维 A website

er xian 二线 Second-line leadership

Fenghua yuan 枫华园 An e-journal

Fu Lianzhang 傅连璋 A well-known doctor whobecame a high ranking CCPofficial

Gao Changxian 高常献 A Gao villager

Gao Gang 高岗 A noted CCP leader in the 1950swho committed suicide after afailed attempt to reshuffle theCCP leadership hierarchy


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gao zhuang 告状 To appeal to officialdom forjustice

Gong Chu 龚楚 A well-known Red Armygeneral

goutou junshi 狗头军师 One who pulls the string for evilaction

Guan Feng 关峰 A well-known CulturalRevolution radical

Guan Weixun 官伟勋 A noted CCP official and writer

guizu 贵族 Noble or aristocratic class

Gu Atao 顾阿桃 A person of humble familybackground promoted toprominent official positionduring the Cultural Revolution

Han Deqiang 韩德强 A well-known Chinese academic

Hao Ran 浩然 A well-known writer ofrevolutionary literature

haojie see shi nian haojie

He Kaiyin 何开荫 A think tank CCP official inAnhui

He Shang 河殇 River Elegy, name of thecontroversial TV programme

He Zhizhen 贺之珍 Mao’s third wife

Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 CCP party leader since 2002

Hu Qiaomu 胡乔木 A CCP official noted for draftingimportant documents

Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦 A CCP party leader in the post-Mao period

Hu Zongnan 胡宗南 A well-known KMT general

Hua Guofeng 华国锋 CCP leader who was appointedby Mao as his successor

Huaxia Wenzhai 华夏文摘 Chinese Digest (an e-journal)

hushi zhang 护士长 Chief nurse

Ji Xianlin 季羡林 A well-known Chinese scholar

Jian Bozan 翦伯赞 A well-known Chinese historian

G L O S S A RY

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Jiang Qing 江青 Mao’s fourth wife

Jiang Zemin 江泽民 Former General Secretary of theCCP

jianzhi mishu 兼职秘书 Part-time secretary

jiao xuefei 交学费 Pay tuition fees

jiaoyu chanyehua 教育产业化 To entrepreneurize education

jin 斤 A weight unit (0.5 kg)

Jin Xiaoding 金小丁 A critic of Jung Chang’sbiography of Mao

jishi wenxue 纪实文学 Factual literature, a genre ofwriting

kang 炕 Bed with a stove underneath

Kang Sheng 康生 A leading CCP officialdemonized in the officialhistoriography

Ke Qingshi 柯庆施 An important CCP official whoused to be the Mayor ofShanghai

Kong Qingdong 孔庆东 A professor of Beijing University

Kuai Dafu 蒯大富 A leading Cultural Revolutionrebel

Lao Gui 老鬼 A well-known Chinese writer

Lao Tian 老田 A well-known e-media debater

Li Changping 李昌平 A well-known advocate ofchange in rural China

Li Jingquan 李井泉 An important CCP provincialleader who caused Sichuan to beone of the provinces worst hit byfamine during Great LeapForward

Li Min 李敏 Daughter of Mao

Li Na 李纳 Daughter of Mao

Li Rui 李锐 An influential anti-Maoist CCPofficial

Li Shenzhi 李慎之 A noted liberal dissident withthe CCP establishment


[ 214 ]

Li Xuanyuan 李选源 An active e-media participant

Li Xuefeng 李雪峰 A noted CCP provincial leader

Li Yining 历以宁 A noted economist

Li Yinqiao 李银桥 One of Mao’s bodyguards

Li Zehou 李泽厚 A noted neo-enlightenmentwriter

Li Zhisui 李志绥 A medical doctor who lookedafter Mao’s health fro someyears

Lian dong 联动 An organization formed bystudents to defend their highranking party officials and armyofficers at the beginning of theCultural Revolution

liang ge fanshi 两个凡是 Two whatevers

lianghuan hua 连环画 Story book illustrated bypictures

Lin Biao 林彪 a CCP leader second to Maoduring the Cultural Revolution

Lin Ke 林克 One of Mao’s secretaries

Liu Guoguang 刘国光 A CCP scholar official

Liu Pingping 刘平平 Daughter of Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇 An important CCP leader whowas one of the main targets ofthe Cultural Revolution

Liu Siqi 刘思齐 Mao’s daughter-in-law

Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波 A leading dissident in Beijingwho advocates Westerncolonialism in China

Liu Yuan 刘源 Son of Liu Shaoqi

Lu Xun 鲁迅 Arguably the greatest modernChinese writer

Luding 卢定 Name of a bridge

Luoyang ribao 洛阳日报 A daily paper in Luoyang

Lushan 庐山 A mountain

G L O S S A RY

[ 215 ]

Ma Yinchu 马寅初 A well-known scholar ofdemography

maiban 买办 Comprador

Mao Zedong 毛泽东 The foremost leader of theChinese 1949 revolution, whodied in 1976

Maojiawan 毛家湾 A residential compound whereLin Biao and his family used tolive

Mawangdui 马王堆 An archaeological site

mu 亩 A Chinese measurement (0.0667hectare)

nian hua 年画 Traditional Spring Festivalpainting

Nien Cheng 念成 An autobiographical writer

Nie Yuanzi 聂元子 A leading Cultural Revolutionrebel

niu gui she shen 牛鬼蛇神 Cow ghost and snake demon infolk stories

niu peng 牛棚 ‘Cowshed’

nongmin xiehui 农民协会 Peasant association

Peng Dehuai 彭德怀 An important CCP official andarmy commander who fell frompolitical power during theLushan Conference in 1959

Peng Zhen 彭真 A powerful CCP leader

po si jiu 破四旧 Destroy the four olds

Qi Benyu 戚本禹 A leading Cultural Revolutionradical

Qiao Guanhua 乔冠华 A well-known diplomat

Qin Shihuang 秦始皇 The first emperor of China

qimeng 启蒙 Enlightenment

qinghaosu 青蒿素 The drug artemisinin

qingli jieji duiwu 清理阶级队伍 Clear the ranks of politicalclasses


[ 216 ]

Quan Yanchi 权延赤 A well-known writer on Mao

Rao Shushi 饶漱石 A noted CCP leader in the 1950sand a close colleague of GaoGang

Ruijin 瑞金 A town where the Red Armywas active

san xian 三线 Third-line industry, referring astrategy to set up importantindustries in central and north-west China in preparation forforeign invasion

sannong Zhongguo三农中国 A website

shangfang 上访 Appeal to higher authorities forjustice

shangshan xiaxiang上山下乡 A campaign by which educatedyouth from urban China weresent into the mountains and thecountryside

Shao Li-tzu (Lizi) 邵力子 An important KMT official

Shen Tu 沈图 Head of the Chinese civilaviation authority

shi liu tiao 十六条 The 16 articles of the CulturalRevolution document issued asguidelines for the movement

shi nian haojie 十年浩劫 Ten-year catastrophe, a termfrequently used to refer to theCultural Revolution in China

Shi Zhe 师哲 A well-known interpreter whoworked with Mao

shouzu yuan 收租院 Rent collection courtyard

si da ziyou 四大自由 Four big freedoms

Sima Qian 司马迁 Ancient historian

Su Yu 粟裕 A well-known PLA general

Sun Zhigang 孙志刚 A migrant from rural China whowas beaten to death by theGuangdong police for nothaving an identity card

G L O S S A RY

[ 217 ]

suzhi 素质 Quality

Suzhou 苏州 A city

Tao Zhu 陶铸 a noted CCP leader during theCultural Revolution

Tian Jiaying 田家英 One of Mao’s most importantsecretaries

tongtian renwu 通天人物 Those who have the ear of thepeople at the very top

tongxun yuan 通讯员 Correspondent

Wang Dongxing 汪东兴 CCP official who was the boss ofMao’s Central Office

Wang Guangmei 王光美 One of Liu Shaoqi wives

Wang Guangying 王光英 Liu Shaoqi’s brother-in-law

Wang Hui 汪晖 An influential Chinese writerand scholar

Wang Jiaxiang 王稼祥 An important CCP leader whosesupport of Mao was crucial forthe latter’s rise during the LongMarch

Wang Jinhong 王金红 Head of Long Bow Village

Wang Li 王力 One of the Cultural Revolutionradicals

Wang Lixiong 王力雄 A well-known Chinese scholarof Tibet

Wang Nianyi 王年一 A leading Chinese historian ofthe Cultural Revolution

Wang Shaoguang 王绍光 A political science professor

Wang Shiwei 王实味 A writer who was executed

Wang Xizhe 王希哲 A leading critic and dissident

Wang Youqin 王友琴 A US-based writer on studentviolence

Wei Se 维色 Woesser, a writer of Tibetanethnicity

Wen Jiabao 温家宝 Premier of the PRC since 2002


[ 218 ]

Wen Tiejun 温铁军 A well-known scholar of ruralChina

Wenzhou 温州 A city

Wu De 吴德 Mayor of Beijing during the lastyears of the Mao era

Wu Lengxi 吴冷西 Former head of the People’sDaily

wu qi gan xiao 五七干校 May Seventh Cadre School

Wu Xujun 吴旭君 Mao’s chief nurse

Wu Zetian 武则天 The only female emperor inChinese history

Wu Zhipu 吴芝圃 Another provincial leader whowas responsible for the GreatLeap Forward disaster

Wuhan 武汉 A city

wuyou zhixiang 乌有之乡 A website

xi panzi 洗盘子 Wash dishes

xiangsheng 相声 Stand-up comic of cross talk

xianzhuang shu 线装书 Thread-bound traditional books

xiaoggang cun 小岗村 Xiaogang Village

Xu Guangping 许广平 Widow of Lu Xun

Yan Jiaqi 严家其 A Chinese political scientist inexile

Yan’an 延安 A town

Yang Changji 扬昌济 Mao’s teacher and father in-law

Yang Kaihui 杨开慧 Mao’s second wife

Yang Shangkun 杨尚昆 An important CCP official

yanhuang chunqiu 炎黄春秋 A Chinese official magazine

Yao Wenyuan 姚文元 A leading Cultural Revolutionradical, one of the so-calledGang of Four

Ye Jianying 叶剑英 One of ten PLA marshals

Ye Yonglie 叶永烈 A well-known Chinese writer

G L O S S A RY

[ 219 ]

yi ku si tian 忆苦思甜 To recall the bitter past and totell of the sweet present

yi yue fengbao 一月风暴 The February Storm, referring toFebruary 1967 when politicalpower in Shanghai was takenover by the rebels

yiliao shichanghua 医疗市场化 To marketize health care

Yinhe 银河 Name of a Chinese ship that wassearched by the US navy

Yu Huiyong 于会咏 A well-known composer andmusician who committedsuicide after his arrest by thepost-Mao authorities

Yu Jianrong 于建荣 A major writer on contemporaryChina

Yu Jie 余杰 A Christian dissident

Yuan Longping 袁隆平 A scientist and expert on hybridrice

Yun Shi 运十 A successful Chinese civilaircraft project that was shelvedby the post-Mao authorities

Zhang Chunqiao 张春桥 One of the four CulturalRevolutionary radical leaders

Zhang Guotao 张国焘 A well-known CCP leader whodefected to the KMT

Zhang Hanzhi 章含之 Wife of Qiao Guanhua

Zhang Naiqi 章乃器 A leading member of the non-CCP intelligentsia and one of themost famous of those who wereclassified as Rightists

Zhang Qian 张茜 Wife of Chen Yi

Zhang Rong 张戎 Jung Chang

Zhang Wentian 张闻天 A noted CCP leader

Zhang Xianliang 张贤亮 A noted contemporary Chinesewriter

Zhang Xueliang 张学良 A well-known KMT general


[ 220 ]

Zhao Ziyang 赵紫阳 A CCP leader who was putunder house arrest after theTiananmen events in 1989

Zhengzhou 郑州 A city

zhiqing 知青 educated youth

Zhongguo 中国工人网 A website

gongren wang

Zhongnanhai 中南海 The CCP leadership compoundin Beijing

Zhou Enlai 周恩来 The first Premier of the PRC

Zhu De 朱德 The legendry Chinese armycommander

Zhu Min 朱敏 Daughter of Zhu De

Zhu Rongj 朱镕基 A former Premier of the PRC

Zhu Zhongli 朱仲丽 Wife of Wang Jiaxiang, a doctorwho became a well-knownwriter by publishing biographiesof Jiang Qing

Zhua geming 抓革命 Grasp the revolution

zhurengong 主人公 A website

zizhi tongjian 资治通鉴 A classical history book

Zunyi 遵义 A town

G L O S S A RY

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[ 222 ]

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[ 266 ]

Index

agriculture, 14, 19, 24, 36, 58, 87, 95,144, 153, 189

alternative model of development,95, 201

America, 14, 25, 30, 37, 39–42, 44–5,94, 99, 102, 117, 140, 144, 158,176, 180, 190

anti-communism, 91anti-tradition, 21, 34army, 6, 18, 19, 38, 50, 54, 58, 61–3,

69, 90, 106, 124, 133, 135, 153,170

arts, 5, 7, 12, 28, 92, 98, 101, 121, 124,138, 143, 148–51, 161, 179,181–2, 185

barefoot doctor, 43, 109, 124Bo Yyibo, 50, 59, 60, 111, 113, 114,

129

capitalism, 4, 7, 11, 31, 32, 44–7,94–5, 114–15, 131, 140, 157,174,177, 182, 185, 187–8, 193–5

CCP, 1, 5, 7, 10, 15, 17–19, 21, 23–7,33–5, 39, 40, 44–51, 53–8, 60–1,67–8, 71, 73–4, 77–8, 81–4, 90,93, 98–9, 103–12, 113, 115,120–2, 124, 126–30, 132–5, 141,146, 149, 174, 177, 183–5, 189,191, 193, 195, 197–8

Chang, Jung, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 14, 16,43–4, 51, 63, 65–82, 84–6, 88–93,97–8, 122, 125, 126, 141, 158–60,165, 168–9, 172, 180

Chen Boda, 2, 49, 53, 60, 111, 113,144

Chen Yi, 59, 60, 78, 123Chen Yun, 55, 84, 105, 109, 113, 126,

142

class struggle, 3, 9, 14, 26–7, 46,55–6, 95, 131, 154, 194

cold war, 1, 5, 16, 31, 32, 38, 58, 89,93, 113, 115, 140, 145, 146, 196

colonialism, 25, 26comprador, 12, 152, 182–5Cultural Revolution, 1, 3–9, 11,

13–24, 26, 28–38, 43–60, 62–4,77–9, 87, 96–7, 99–100, 102, 104,106, 108–10, 113, 115, 117, 119,123, 124, 128–9, 131–9, 144–5,147–8, 150–5, 157, 174, 177, 196

attitudes, 39, 114, 116, 118, 120,133, 159, 165–6

autobiographies, 1, 2, 8, 10, 31,37, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56, 62–4,128

biographies, 1, 2, 8, 10, 13, 31, 37,48, 48–64, 88, 97, 99, 107, 115,128, 148

capitalist roaders, 7, 18, 132–3,177, 197

cowshed, 60, 134constructive, 5, 9, 22–3, 96, 114cultural creativity, 28–9destruction, 5, 9, 17–18, 20–1,

23–4, 26–8, 32, 34, 95–6, 133,135, 155, 158, 176, 188

economic achievements, 138–40farmers, 1, 3, 11–13, 111, 113, 124,

146–7, 152–3, 158, 161, 167,172, 174, 192

haojie (or holocaust), 9, 15–16knowledge gap, 100memories, 2, 8, 9, 10, 30, 31, 37,

45, 46–8, 51, 63, 97, 100, 135,153

in Chinese language, 48–64by expatriate Chinese, 97–116

narratives, 63hegemony, 4, 9, 11, 56, 117,

119, 137, 157, 190challenges, 1, 48, 49, 57, 61–2,

108, 110, 119, 123, 132,136–7, 157–8

style, 59–61new subjectivity, 5, 7, 96, 174political identification, 9, 31, 45politics of sex, 56, 101–2, 103,106,

107, 124, 205violence, 4, 9, 11, 17–19, 34, 93–5,

135, 201rebels, 11, 18, 24, 33, 39, 132–3,

135Red Guards, 3, 6, 11, 16, 18, 20,

24, 27, 57, 77, 132–3, 135–6Tibet, 9, 11, 23–7

cultural genocide, 27religion, 23–7

two-line struggle, 128–9, 137, 144workers, 1, 3, 6, 11, 13, 45, 57, 113,

119, 124, 142, 145, 152–3,157–8, 160–1, 168–70, 174,177–9, 181, 186–7, 190, 193,195–6

democracy, 6, 9, 11, 16, 20, 23, 31–3,35, 37–8, 40, 45–7, 79, 89, 93, 95,99, 115, 121, 139–40, 157, 172,200

Deng Pufang, 3Deng Xiaoping, 3, 8, 15, 19, 45–6, 50,

53–5, 62, 78, 85, 102, 105, 109,111–12, 114, 124–7, 132, 137,144–5, 153, 158, 174, 177, 187,189–90, 198

development, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 19,20, 31, 34–5, 38, 40, 41,55, 59,86–8, 95, 113, 115, 120, 128–9,134, 143–6, 157–8, 161, 164, 167,169, 172–3, 175–6, 180, 185, 187,189, 190, 192, 194, 195, 199, 200

dissidents, 9, 16, 134, 157, 203

economy, 4, 11, 12, 16, 19, 37, 41,45–6, 54–5, 59, 87–8, 94, 119,129, 137–40, 144–5, 154, 175,179–80

capital accumulation, 166, 176chronicle of achievements, 144food shortage, 142, 147infrastructure, 5, 34, 140, 145–6,

154, 165, 179, 180living standard, 87, 140, 167, 199third-line industry, 145

elite, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 15, 16, 18, 29, 30,33, 34, 36, 39, 41–3, 45, 57–9, 67,87, 100, 106, 109, 113, 120–1,123–4, 133, 139, 150–1, 154–5,157–8, 164, 166–8, 171, 182,184–6, 189–90, 193, 199–200

e-media, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 37–40,48–9, 117, 119, 121–3, 125–6,128–9, 132, 135–8, 140–1, 143,146–2, 154–8, 165, 176

Enlightenment, 9, 21, 23, 30–5, 92,200

environment, 12, 37, 58, 91, 125, 140,144, 161, 182, 188–9, 200

Gong Chu, 67–8Great Leap Forward, 4, 6, 8, 11, 20,

51, 54,44, 59, 61, 75, 77–8, 82,84–7, 99, 106, 110, 111–14, 119,121, 124, 126–9, 140, 142, 153,199

death toll, 4, 77, 85–6, 112, 140–2,197

decentralization, 142backyard furnace, 110–11, 113famine, 4, 6, 8, 20, 25, 54, 77, 85–6,

89, 111, 119–21, 126–7,139–42, 153

Lushan Conference, 61, 102, 108,110, 114, 123, 126–8

I N D E X

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Halliday, Jon, 2, 4, 10, 11, 65–73,75–82, 85–6, 88–93, 125–6, 141

history, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 23,28–32, 37–8, 43, 44–5, 47–8,50–1, 55–63, 73–4, 80, 82, 84, 88,91–2, 94–5, 97–8, 101, 107, 110,115–17, 122, 125, 128, 135, 137,140, 141, 150–1, 156–7, 159,173–4, 184, 198

Hong Kong, 22, 39, 40, 48–9, 53, 57,59, 65, 67, 79, 91, 99, 102, 138,140

Hua Guofeng, 52, 198human rights, 2, 5, 6, 7, 12, 30, 35,

40, 42, 89, 167

India, 20, 25, 38, 41, 138–40, 187inequality, 125, 178–9intelligentsia, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13,

15–16, 18, 29, 30, 33–4, 36,39–40, 87, 92, 107–8, 121, 155,137, 166, 167, 193, 199

Japan, 1, 21, 32–5, 41–2, 66, 76, 78,79, 138, 145–6, 176, 180

Jiang Qing, 11, 33, 49, 50, 55, 57, 58,62, 89, 90, 99, 107, 119, 130, 137,148–50

Kang Sheng, 54, 57, 123, 154–5knowledge, 9, 19, 25, 31, 45, 47, 67,

73, 75, 77, 88, 93, 97–8, 100–1,103, 106, 112–13, 115, 118, 123,125, 136, 148–9, 154–5, 157, 167,180, 192–3, 195

Korean War, 38, 79Kuai Dafu, 52, 148

landownership, 45, 146, 158, 185,

187–8, 192, 194–6responsibility system, 84, 147,

156, 189, 191

seizure, 78, 124, 184, 187Li Na, 52, 66, 67, 77–8, 89, 109Li Rui, 61, 111, 114, 121–2, 126Li Xuefeng, 62, 130Li Zhisui, 2, 11, 30, 97, 103, 105–6,

110, 112, 115–16, 162Lin Biao, 33, 49, 50, 52, 54–5, 57–60,

62, 78, 99, 108, 128Lin Ke, 103–5, 107, 109, 112Liu Shaoqi, 7, 17, 33, 46, 54, 55, 57,

60, 66, 74, 77, 78, 85, 90, 95, 100,105, 109–10, 103, 122–4, 126–9,132, 150, 155, 177

Liu Yuan, 51, 52, 78, 134Long March, 58, 66, 74–6, 106, 126Lu Xun, 17, 34–5

Ma Yichu, 120Mao

charisma, 88comparison with Hitler, 11,

15–16, 65, 75, 77, 78, 88–9education, 62, 89, 119health care, 109, 124, 151ideas, 5, 6, 7, 19, 23, 55, 58, 62,

109, 113–14, 115, 116, 128–32late Mao thesis, 55, 57, 121, 123,

125legacy, 12, 16, 33, 35, 56, 139, 156,

171, 190, 192–3, 196–7, 201literature and arts, 124, 151personality, 4, 8, 65, 76, 86, 88–9,

90, 93, 137, 148and population, 120–1power struggle, 6, 55–7, 59, 62,

64, 82, 100, 108–10, 114–15,128, 137

sex, 56, 101–3, 106–7, 124Mao era, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14,

15, 34–5, 37, 59, 76, 81, 85, 87,99, 107, 117, 119, 125, 134,136–40, 143–8, 151–5, 157, 171,174–6, 186, 191, 193, 196–7, 201


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Maoism, 47, 157, 174May the Fourth Movement, 9, 21,

32–5, 154memoirs, 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 13, 31, 37,

42–3, 45, 48–54, 56–7, 62–4, 67,76, 78, 85, 89–90, 97–107, 115,128, 134–5

migrant workers, 3, 7, 119, 158,160–1, 167–70, 177–9, 186–7,195, 209

modernity, 23, 95, 159, 163–4, 166,174, 188

modernization, 21, 24, 35, 44–5, 166

nationalism, 24, 33, 35, 46neoliberalism, 4, 7, 9, 117new left, 8, 11, 189Nie Yuanzi, 52–3

peasantry, 35, 95, 113, 163, 172, 192Peng Dehuai, 58, 61, 77, 107, 110,

123, 126pollution, 144, 188post-Mao reforms, 2, 6, 8, 11, 12, 16,

18, 19, 20, 22, 31, 54–5, 59, 60,84, 87, 98, 111, 117, 120, 123, 125,132, 138–41, 143–4, 146–8,151–3, 155–7, 166–7, 169–70,174–7, 179, 182, 186, 189, 191,195–6, 198–9

Qi Benyu, 105–7, 111, 115–16, 119,123, 126, 128, 130, 134, 137,139,148

Qiao Guanhua, 52, 204

Revolution, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11,22–9, 33–5, 42–4, 46, 57, 60, 62,67–8, 72, 81, 85, 88–9, 92–6, 113,115, 117, 120, 127–33, 135, 144,147, 149–51, 158, 174, 184, 200,201

Ricoeur, P., 31, 46–7rural China, 7, 8, 12, 19, 28–9, 87, 90,

123–4, 129–30, 146, 153, 157,159–60, 165–6, 169, 171–2, 179,191, 195, 197–9

scar literature, 32Shangshan xiaxiang, 35sinological orientalism, 38special economic zone, 41, 181–2,

194socialism, 45, 47, 117, 131, 177, 185,

187, 191–6Song Bingbing, 136Song Qinling, 76Soviet Union, 35, 62, 76, 77, 86, 92–3,

105, 113, 115, 122, 126, 130, 132,145, 149, 185, 193

Stalin, 15, 38, 65, 71, 75, 77–9, 108,114, 130, 193

technology, 143, 146–7, 164, 182–4,200

four modern inventions, 143tradition, 2, 9, 10, 15, 20–5, 28, 30,

33–5, 40, 55–6, 60, 88–9, 93–5,98, 117, 121, 134, 150, 154, 170,195, 200

transnational, 12, 158, 180–3truth, 5, 6, 27, 29, 31, 34, 45, 47, 52–3,

68, 80, 83, 86–7, 91, 97, 99, 103,122, 127, 136–7, 141, 147–8,155–7, 189, 191–7

United States, 5, 8, 9, 11, 19, 25, 30,43–4, 45, 90, 91, 101, 107, 118,121, 132, 135, 138, 140, 145–6,167, 169, 173–8, 181, 183, 185,187, 193, 195, 197, 199, 203, 208

values and beliefs, 4, 7, 8, 12, 82,101, 129, 195

I N D E X

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Vietnam War, 40, 145

Wang Dongxing, 52, 103, 106–7Wang Guangmei, 51–2, 66, 78, 130Wang Hongwen, 49Wang Jiaxiang, 208Wang Jihong, 199Wang Li, 23–4, 33, 49, 52, 60, 62–2,

78, 129–33, 154Wang Xizhe, 134whateverism, 38–9, 134welfare, 152–3, 157, 190Wu De, 62

Wu Faxian, 57Wu Xujun, 103–5

Ye Jianying, 62, 135Yu Jianrong, 12, 170, 172, 193

Zhang Chunqiao, 33, 49, 55, 57, 158Zhang Hanzhi, 51–2, 79Zhou Enlai, 19, 49, 55–7, 60, 67–8,

77–8, 82, 86, 99, 105, 107, 109,110, 111, 114, 126, 128, 135, 153,155, 174

Zhu De, 17, 78, 105, 111, 122


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